I: Eve of the Eternal
by Ancalagar the Dragon Lord
Summary: Pete failed to save Rose, and she fell into the Void. Two years later, a mysterious ship crashes at Torchwood Tower, and the Doctor, Jack, Martha, and Donna must stop it before it creates a black hole and destroys Earth. Seems simple enough. The catch? Anyone with a past connection with Rose Tyler is in deadly danger. Part I of "The Perennials" saga.
1. Prologue: On This Wednesday

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Prologue  
>On this Wednesday<p>

_London  
>8 August 2007<em>

Wednesday is a central point in a cycle of human time-telling, named after Odin, the Norse god of victory and of death. Each week has a Wednesday, the year fifty-two, and wars an indefinite quantity. But this war had only one day, and that was Wednesday.

On this Wednesday

Adeola Oshodi met her cousins Martha and Leticia Jones for lunch. The hour following was enjoyable but perfectly ordinary. Adeola ordered a ham sandwich and a small salad. Martha opted for some soup. Tish gagged on a bitter piece of Gorgonzola cheese that wasn't supposed to be in her wrap. She also had overslept that day and was a bit grumpy because of it. A man sat nearby reading a newspaper: a British soldier had died in Baghdad; the new Harry Potter book had sold more copies in two weeks than _Gone with the Wind_ had in decades. A man named Harold Saxon had started a campaign for Prime Minister. The front page was ordinary, on a perfectly ordinary day.

Martha had found an internship at the Royal Hope Hospital, and would be working and training there for the next two semesters. Tish was about to apply for a job at a research laboratory. Adeola had just found a new boyfriend named Matt, but didn't say much about her new job. She simply told them that she was a secretary at Canary Wharf.  
>At ten past, they went their ways. The ghost shift would come on in ten minutes.<p>

Adeola went back to work.  
>She and her boyfriend sneaked into the office renovations for a snog.<br>She never came home.

On this Wednesday

Yvonne Hartman watched excitedly as a blue box materialized before the soldiers in the storage unit. After more than one hundred and twenty years of study, tracking, and waiting, he had come. Queen Victoria's institute had finally tracked down the Doctor, the enemy of the state, and it was under Yvonne's leadership. _If it's alien, it's ours._ Some would question her motives, but in time she and her colleagues and their predecessors would be viewed as heroes of the Second British Empire. She waited with baited breath as the Tardis finally shifted into full view. It was August 8th, 2007. It was Torchwood's finest hour.

On this Wednesday

Jack Harkness monitored the energy readings of the Cardiff Time Rift, but something about the date bothered him, something that brought his mind back to the history textbooks of his home century, but he couldn't remember the significance of August 8th, 2007. He alone remained concerned about the ghosts pressing themselves into the world, but he had no evidence of their hostile intent, so he could only watch.

He shook his head absentmindedly. A few days earlier it was Hiroshima day; perhaps that was what he was thinking of. He remembered that day too. He would never forget this day.

A ghost appeared in the room.

It shifted into clearer focus. A metal hand suddenly grabbed Jack's shoulder, and he blacked out.

On this Wednesday his misgivings proved to be fatally correct. When Jack came to, all of his colleagues, except Suzie Costello, were dead.

On this Wednesday  
>On this sunny, summer day<p>

On this bright, summer day, it was silent in London for the briefest moment, when smoke slowly rose into the air, carrying with it the ashes and blood of the dead, before the cries of terror and grief penetrated the shock of battle.

On this Wednesday, August 8th, 2007,  
>Five million Cybermen invaded Earth.<br>Twenty million Daleks escaped the Time War.  
>Three hundred thousand humans died all across the world, and<br>On this Wednesday, Rose Tyler fell into the Void.

* * *

><p>White. Blank. Empty. It had texture, but merely that of cold plaster. It contained no warmth, no feeling, no soul; it was just an impassive, mocking wall. The Doctor placed his hand on the cool plaster, then pressed his ear upon it, listening hard for he knew not what. But there was no sound. It was empty. It was void. There was nothing. That was the sound of nothing.<p>

He stepped back, still running his hand over the white paint, a part of him clinging desperately to one last home, that though he could not hear her, somehow he'd be able to feel her; but there was nothing, no indication, no sign, not the smallest trace of her warmth that he remembered. Rose Tyler was gone.

The Doctor finally took his hand from the wall, staring blankly at the offending barrier. He wasn't sure how long he stood there. It was only the distant sound of sirens outside that brought him back to reality, and he turned around, turning away from the loss, turning away from her, abandoning her, losing her. He stepped away, moving on, leaving, going, always running because he had to. Walking numbly across the chamber to the exit, he didn't look back. He couldn't. He wasn't strong enough.

The Doctor didn't stop walking. He slowly descended the stairs, barely noticing the forty-five floors he passed. Numbers were meaningless. They were cold, soulless, amoral. Six, six, six, but it was meaningless. She was gone, and it seemed to him that nothing was worth anything anymore.

But his face remained as blank as the taunting wall upstairs. The shock of what had happened was so great that he couldn't feel at all. It was all too much. He passed several motionless bodies on the stairs, but he couldn't look at them. The numbness intensified. He passed two chambers, and the pungent smell of burning flesh and blood reached his nostrils, but he kept walking. A journey of what his Gallifreyan senses told him was eight minutes and fifty-two seconds seemed to be an eternity, but finally he found himself staring at the blue police box. Then, willing himself forward, he reached into his pocket and produced a key from within. His hand shaking violently, the Doctor barely managed to fit it into the lock and turn it. The door swung open with a creak, and he stepped inside the Tardis, and slowly closed the door, finally resting his head upon it, unmoving.

Her eyes had been closed at the last, but her face was not peaceful. That was his first thought. She fell silent before oblivion swallowed her, but the terror of death and nonexistence was pronounced in her demeanor. But she was brave, even to the very end, valiantly facing death with dignity.

Valiantly… _The Valiant Child will die in battle so very soon…_ and the Doctor had denied it, telling her that it was a lie. She accepted that, but he knew that deep down she didn't really believe him. He had felt the storm coming, and he knew that in the last days she had felt it too.

Finally he admitted the horrible truth of those condemning words he'd disregarded in his fear: at twenty years old, Rose Marion Tyler was dead.

It was then that a strange sound broke the silence, a pulsating ambience, a quiet but pronounced and rushed tempo, and he turned to look at the console, listening closely as he saw her face flicker, just for a moment, on the monitor. Then he realized that the Tardis was softly crying.

Something in him broke then, and he cried too.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **

**Well, this is the start of the revision. Those who remember the original story will find only a couple additions to this chapter. In the coming chapters, there will be a few changes to plot that hopefully will make this story a bit more intense. **

**The theme of "On this Wednesday" was inspired by the short story "An diesem Dienstag" by Wolfgang Borchert.**

**Coming soon: "Chapter One: Fire in the Rain." Extended version of the original chapter (which can still be viewed in the old draft).**

**I love and appreciate constructive feedback, so please leave any comments you'd like to make. **


	2. Chapter One: Fire in the Rain

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Chapter One  
>Fire in the Rain<p>

A repetitious, high-pitched, beeping sound filled her ears, and instinctively she slammed her fingers down upon the snooze button. It was 7:30. Amaranthine groaned and sat up, rubbing her eyes blearily and half-expecting to hear her mother bustling around the kitchen, but it was quiet. She muttered to herself for a moment, far more inclined to return to sleep, but she had to get up. That was life. So she slid out of bed and stretched her back out before taking a step forward to exit her room and enter the kitchen.

She was seated at the kitchen table, a couple of slices of toast before her, and a newspaper flung carelessly onto the table surface, though for some reason Amaranthine couldn't quite read the words. She shook her head and helped herself to a piece of toast, glancing out the window as she buttered it; there were a couple of people outside, wandering around the littered courtyard, but she paid them no further attention. She started to eat; there were no crumbs on the plate or on the table.

She was standing at a bus stop, waiting for one of the red double-deckers to come by. She was dimly aware of someone standing next to her, a blond man in a gray hoodie and red sweats. His face wasn't really in focus, but this meant little to her.

The red bus finally pulled over, and Amaranthine stepped inside, where she saw a more recognizable woman in the driver's seat, who turned to her with a stern look. "Right, you've only got this until six o'clock, so get on with it."

"Mum, where the hell did you get that from?" she asked, bewildered.

"Roderigo," the blonde woman replied. "He owes me a favor. Never mind why, but you were right about your dad, sweetheart. He was full of mad ideas, and it's exactly what he would have done."

Down the street, a wolf barked.

There was a dark-skinned man sitting in the bus seat across from her, and he looked at her. "Tea. Like we're having a picnic while the world comes to an end. Very British."

Amaranthine pursed her lips. "I'm not going on about it, Mickey. Really, I'm not."

The man shrugged, and went back to his Playstation. Amaranthine, however, frowned, puzzled. She didn't know his name. Did she?

He wasn't looking at her, but distantly she heard his voice, "Tell me about what the Doctor's planning, and I can help you, Rose."

Amaranthine didn't pay much heed. In the midst of her own oblivion, the words meant nothing to her.

Nothing. Oblivion.

_There will be problems you never faced, trials that will either make or break you__,_ declared a serene voice surrounded by golden light. _You will suffer trauma of all calibers. You will feel heartbreak and fear and uncertainty._

"So you're sending the Daleks and Cybermen to hell?" the dark-skinned man asked.

"You have to let go of me, sweetheart." Amaranthine looked out the window at the indistinct buildings rolling past. "I'm always saying that."

The bus stopped, and she alighted from it onto the street corner, where a red-haired man stood before her, and gave her a thumb's up. "Trust me on this," he told her quietly, a soft smile gracing his features. "If you want a cup of tea, kitchen's down there, milk's in the fridge. It would be, wouldn't it? Where else would you put the milk? Mind you, there's always the windowsill outside. I always thought if someone invented a windowsill with special compartments, one for milk, one for yoghurt, make a lot of money out of that. Sell it to students and things." He paused from his rambling, and frowned. "I should write that down."

He handed her a phone, and she absentmindedly placed it against her ear. _Watson, come here. I need you. Watson, come here, I need you. Doctor, come here, I need you. Watson, come here, I need you._

She handed the phone back. "That's not out yet," she told him.

The red-haired man pocketed the phone. "He didn't want you to go through it again. Not if there was another way. Now there isn't."

Amaranthine frowned at him. There was something about this man that made her feel strange, like she could depend on him, like she was somehow protected. "Go through what again?" she asked, confused. "Who didn't want what?"

Then another man stood next to him, an older man with big ears and a leather jacket. He looked at the red-haired man. "Jackie gave her to me to look after. How times change." He looked at Amaranthine, and in a distinct northern accent (what was north, anyway?), he reassured her, "I wasn't really gonna leave you on your own."

"I know," she heard her own voice reply, but she wasn't sure what she knew.

"But between you and me, I haven't got a plan," he told her sadly. "No idea. No way out."

"You'll think of something," she told him. For some reason, she was never more sure of anything, though that didn't make much sense to her.

"And then you close it?" the red-haired man asked him. "For good?"

"Stop right there," Amaranthine heard herself snap. A sudden blank whiteness seemed to flood her mind, a blinding whiteness, and in a distant memory, something was telling her that it would hurt. Just as quickly as it came, however, something golden pushed it back. "I know what you're saying," she told him, "and we're not going There. At no point are we going anywhere near There. You aren't even aware that There exists. I don't want to think about There, and believe me, neither do you. There, for you, is like the Bermuda Triangle."

"Where's this come from all of a sudden?" asked the man in the leather jacket.

The other man was looking at her strangely."Blimey, you know how to flatter a bloke. … I'll take you back to the loony bin where you belong… except I'm sure I've seen you somewhere before. You're not related to my wife by any chance, are you?"

"All right," she told Leather Jacket, "if we can't, if it goes against the laws of time or something, then never mind. Just leave it."

"No, I can do anything," he replied. "I'm just more worried about you." His expression was strangely sad. "Don't worry. The thing that you changed will stay changed. The older something is, the stronger it is."

The serene, disembodied voice, that sounded somehow so familiar, spoke again. _You will be running a gauntlet, but if you run well, you will emerge with few regrets, stronger and better than you ever were in this fading timeline. _

Leather Jacket slowly exhaled, looking tired. "The past is another country," he told her quietly. "1987 is just the Isle of Wight."

_The Valiant Child who will die in battle so very soon. _

Kaput.

Then both men vanished, and the sky suddenly darkened. The ground quivered, and dark, ravenous, flying creatures suddenly appeared in the sky, shrieking in alarm. A huge horned beast, steeped in darkness, roared somewhere within her range of awareness, and for the first time fear seemed to fill her being. Then Amaranthine's whole body convulsed, and suddenly she was surrounded by a strange whiteness, but not light. Then she blinked, and sat up. London, the bus, and her mother had all vanished. The whole room, a place of hexagons and white walls, seemed hazy. An alarm went off. Then she heard it.

_Alteration negative__!_

_Explain yourself, Caan! What happened? Why did it fail? _

Amaranthine tried to blink, to inhale, to do anything, but somehow her body seemed paralyzed… except that her hand seemed to be moving of its own accord, beyond her control. She inwardly shuddered and tried to focus, and realized that she was looking at some sort of panel covered with strange controls that were foreign to her, familiar to her.

Then she felt something seem to close in her around her, and just as suddenly as the white room appeared, she found herself in a state of darkness.

_Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep_.

She slammed her fingers down on the snooze button, and stared at the alarm clock. Half past seven, as usual. Amaranthine sat up, now staring off into space, remembering the dream.

A man clad in a green robe watched her with a scientific interest. Looking at the similarly-dressed woman beside him, he held up a small screen, which showed the image of a blue rose. "This image was the only thing I could extract from her mind," he told his colleague. "Some sort of angiosperm."

"Her name?" asked the woman.

"Possibly."

"Amaranthine."

Amaranth. Amaranthine. Rose. Amaranthine. Rose. Rose. Amaranthine. Amaranthine. Amaranthine. Rose.

The world around them trembled. The Helial scientists vanished. Then Amaranthine froze when the angry, gravelly voice spoke again: _You will trace the fault! This will not fail! Obey! Obey your creator! OBEY!_

* * *

><p><em>2 June 2009<em>

The residents of London woke up to a thick, gray cloud cover which rolled in from the Atlantic, not an unusual condition by any means, but upon stepping outside, they found that it was unusually cold for June. The weather forecast predicted a light rainfall later that day. They were correct in that would rain, but they miscalculated the intensity of the so-called drizzle. By noon, it was raining so hard that the gutters overflowed and flooded the streets, where people hurriedly waded to their respective business. Dr. Martha Jones was among them, soaked even through her raincoat, and very glad that she had a change of dry clothes at work.

A flash of lightning lit up the sky, followed by an earsplitting crash. Martha drew her hood up tighter, but her hair already was very wet, and this did her little good. After a few minutes, just as she was considering turning back, Martha spotted a café a few paces away, and hurried past a Woolworth, hastily opened a door, and ran inside.

"Hold on a moment!" called out a blonde girl standing behind the counter. "Let me get you some towels. Ted's done enough mopping today."

Martha repressed a snort, but seeing the puddle forming beneath her feet, she could see the girl's point. At any rate, regardless of the waitress's rudeness, Martha was even less inclined to go back outside than to eat with her service. So as she waited for the towels to come, she discarded her coat and stepped back over the threshold to try to shake the water out. When she turned back, the waitress had already returned with the towel, which she draped over Martha's back. Choosing not to comment, the latter moved to a table by the window and lowered herself into a chair next to a TV screen, which showed a BBC report speculating on the possibility of the city closing the roads by the Thames in case of flooding.

"It's practically flooding already," Martha grumbled as another rumble sounded outside.

She then picked up the menu, a list printed on some cheap copy paper that lay on the table. After a few minutes, she looked up to call the waitress over, and in the corner of her eye she saw the TV suddenly go static. So she looked at it, and stared in mild surprise at the image just visible through the static, but in a second the image turned back to the news report.

"What can I get you, love?" The waitress's voice asked suddenly.

"Huh?" Martha blinked at the waitress. "Oh, sorry. I think the chicken soup and a cup of cappuccino's just the thing for me today."

The waitress nodded and ran to the kitchen to give the order. Martha looked back to the TV screen, bemused, because for a moment she could have sworn she'd seen the thin and pallid face of a woman looking back at her from the screen, her face covered with mechanical implants and wires, and her eyes glazed and empty.

* * *

><p>She paced the room, which still was hazy before her eyes, and massaged her temples. Voices echoed in her mind, not in her mind, pounding in her ears and her mind though there was no sound. Voices she recognized, voices she didn't recognize, screaming from oblivion:<p>

_A wonderfully familiar voice: "You're unraveling the very structure of the time vortex!"_

_"Ten… eleven… twelve…"_

_A gravelly voice that made her shiver: "I'm doing the very thing no Time Lord ever dared attempt."_

_"Exterminate! Exterminate!"_

_A commanding voice: "And for what purpose should we save the human?"_

_A motherly voice: "I'm not leaving her!"_

_A chorus of voices: "The Void. The Howling. Nonexistence. Oblivion. Hell."_

_"Twenty-eight… twenty-nine…"_

_Eternally: "Amaranthine. Amaranthine. Amaranthine."_

_"STOP IT!" Rose screamed._

The voices faded. The room shifted back into focus. Something had changed, but it was still wrong. Amaranthine could feel it. She could _taste_ it.

She stepped outside the library and onto the balcony overlooking the sea, and gazed at the horizon, where the twin suns were coming to a set, or as close to a set as was possible at one of the poles of Ethrae, if it really was Ethrae.

There was no consistency. Something was telling her that the Helials should be there too, but the building was always empty. The planet itself was empty; and that voice, the artificial voice which haunted her, its whisperings had grown slightly louder, muttering numbers mainly, but it had become more distinct, as though someone was there with her and yet not there; and sometimes, separate from this world, she saw strange rooms and brightly-lit hallways containing technologies she recognized but had never learned.

Something didn't feel right. It was nothing she could pinpoint, but she could sense it. After a moment of quiet reflection, she turned and retreated into the library and seated herself at the desk, placing her hand on the control panel by the computer screen, seeking a connection.

Something had gone wrong, and she was going to find out what.

* * *

><p>The computer screen had energy readings, but there were no blips, no significant changes since the night before. The long-range scans made a full survey of the surrounding exosphere and five astronomical units beyond, detecting nothing except for a few asteroids and a small comet slowly moving past Mars; the SUV was clean and the Weevils were fed. In short, Torchwood 3 was experiencing the unthinkable: complete boredom.<p>

Unable to stand leaning back in his chair and continue watching the news discuss rain, Captain Jack Harkness stood and walked out of his office to see Gwen Cooper by Tosh's old computer, dusting off the screen; with nothing else to do, she had spent the morning tidying up the Hub.

"Still no change?" Jack asked wearily, nodding at the now clean computer screen.

Gwen shook her head. "Everything's normal," she replied. Then considering her words, she amended, "Well, not so normal for us. Boring. There's a big bag of trash in the front that I'll have to take out; there's gum on the floor by the Weevils, and if you've got a solvent somewhere that can take it off, that would be great. Janet's busy drooling all over her holding cell for some reason, and I think Ianto's gone upstairs for some lunch."

Jack grinned mischievously. "Love me enough to clear up my office?"

Gwen scowled. "Clean up your own stuff! I'm not your mother!"

"God forbid," Jack cheerfully responded.

"Besides, knowing you, there's a lot of stuff in there I don't want to know about, if the interactive smut I just found on this computer is any indication, and don't try to tell me Ianto downloaded it."

"Not my mother, my ass," Jack mumbled irritably. "What were you doing snooping on that computer anyway?"

"You're not the only one who uses it," Gwen countered. "If Tosh was still alive, she'd kill you."

"Lucky I'm immortal, then."

"She'd find a way." Stepping back from the computer, Gwen flung the rag she'd been using into a bin, and looked at her watch. "Maybe I should just go home."

Jack shrugged. "You might as well."

Gwen nodded, and headed over to the exit, where she put on a poncho she'd hung on the railing.

"If you see Ianto," Jack called, "tell him to go home too. I'll give you both a call if something comes up."

* * *

><p>"<em>This is what we do, Doctor. This is what I created the Daleks for. A purified universe for a pure race, a universe which readily supplies the key to that purification."<em>

_"The edges of infinity are fluctuating."_

_"Exterminate! Exterminate!"_  
><em>"There is none who can stop me."<em>

_A Rose and an Amaranth blossomed side by side in a garden, and the Amaranth said to her neighbour, "How I envy you your beauty and your sweet scent! No wonder you are such a universal favourite." But the Rose replied with a shade of sadness in her voice, "Ah, my dear friend, I bloom but for a time: my petals soon wither and fall, and then I die. But your flowers never fade, even if they are cut; for they are everlasting."_

_"Restoration complete."_

She recoiled and quickly withdrew her hand from the panel, as though she'd been burned. The voice was louder and clearer than ever, and suddenly she knew. Glancing around the library, she suddenly felt more alert than she had been for many years. Restoration complete. The ship was repaired, and all tasks were done. The last neural connection had been made, and she knew, she remembered everything.

Amaranthine. Rose. Her name. How could she have forgotten that? But it was of little matter now. Suddenly everything was clear, everything that was wrong: the breach.

"It's open," she whispered. Then she laughed, her voice shaking. "It's open!"

Two realities, that was the answer: one physical, one born of the subconscious, and she was trapped in both of them. But no longer! She could leave; the breach was open. It was a chance, an opportunity to escape from an eternal prison, if she could just find the strength to fight for it.

Closing her eyes, she focused as hard as she could. Then she could see it: a bionic hand reached for a control panel in some other reality–she knew not what–but it was the connection she needed.

Rose Amaranthine. Rose Tyler. That was her name.

"Neural relays unstable," a monotonous voice announced. "Attempting to compensate."

A sudden wave of exhaustion swept over her, and the hand faltered. Her eyes were already closed, but she seemed to sink further into the blackness; but the other, the second presence, a foreign voice grew louder as she awakened. The captor was already dragging her back.

Opening her eyes, she struggled to stay awake. "Oh, no you don't!" she hissed. "My name is Rose Tyler, and I refuse to continue as your slave!"

Exerting an almighty effort, she forced the metal hand forward until it made contact with the control, and she forced her will into the mainframe.

There was a roar, and a flash of sparks. An alarm sounded, and in the physical reality, she felt herself stumble back as the ship rocked violently. The numbers now sounded in her head louder than ever, and she felt some unseen force fling her back at the control panel. Outside of her own doing, the pair of hands she could see, one metal, one flesh, reached for the controls again, and she fought to prevent Eve of the Eternal from overriding her command. Another violent tremor rocked the control room, and then they were falling. The ship was falling out of her prison, but then the numbers pounded in her head, causing her to recoil and clutch at her temples in agony; then she also was falling, sinking into darkness. The library was fading all around her, and her limbs felt heavy. Still, she struggled because she had to. It was her only way out; she had to stay conscious and fight long enough to find the right Doctor.

_Amaranthine. Rose. Rose. Amaranthine. Rose. Bad Wolf. Amaranthine. Amaranthine. _

_RoseRoseWolfAmaranthineRoseRoseRoseBadAmaranthineAmaranthineAmaranthineBadWolf_

_Rose Amaranthine. _

_With one last effort, she opened her eyes and shouted into the emptiness before losing consciousness: __"Ten thousand years of incarceration, but no more!"__  
><em>

* * *

><p>At about one o' clock in the afternoon, a tremendous crash echoed across London, but nobody immediately looked to the source of the noise, not in a thunderstorm; nobody except those on the Isle of Dogs. The bang was so loud that the could all feel the ground quivering beneath their feet. Near London's tallest tower, a couple of people even lost balance and fell over.<p>

A voice shouted out, "Holy _shit!_" and those who hadn't already seen it looked in the direction he indicated, to Canary Wharf.

At about the same time, Martha Jones ate her soup in a small but respectable café, deep in thought, and thus wasn't paying much attention to the BBC until the waitress let out a surprised exclamation, drawing her attention to the breaking news report, that of an explosion at One Canada Square, about halfway up England's tallest skyscraper. A wall of flame erupted from within, consuming at least five floors, and debris was blasted from the tower in every direction. Images of smoke emerging from the burning tower appeared on every news station in Britain. They all saw it. They simply didn't know, no one could know, that it was no ordinary explosion; no one except Martha Jones and the rest of the United Intelligence Taskforce.

At about one o' clock in the afternoon, the Rift's energy readings on the late Toshiko Sat's computer suddenly spiked. But Ianto Jones was out have his lunch, Gwen Cooper was gathering her things to go home for the day, and Jack Harkness stood in the cryo-chamber, staring at a cryogenics capsule which no one had dared to open or even touch for weeks, labeled "Gray."

He wasn't looking at Tosh's computer. No one was looking. None of the remaining Torchwood employees saw the energy spike.

In a time ship far across the universe, there was no particular date or time, but the Tardis felt something new and almost unnatural. She couldn't pinpoint it, nor could she identify it, but for a split second, she felt something strange. Something was very, very wrong, but she couldn't tell what.

In a time ship far across the universe, there was no particular date or time, but the Time Lord, still recovering from an unsettling incident on the planet Midnight, wasn't looking when it happened. He did not see the unique signal flash across the monitor on the Tardis console, nor did he feel his time ship falter.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: This is the unabridged, redrafted version of Chapter 1 in the original. I'm sure you've noticed that it heavily quotes from _Doctor Who_ episodes, especially "Father's Day" (which I think is one of the best episodes of the Christopher Eccleston series). Also, the bit about the Rose and the Amaranth is one of Aesop's fables. **


	3. Chapter Two: The White Guardian

**This chapter isn't as wild as the last, but bear with me. The story will start really moving starting the next chapter. **

Chapter Two  
>The White Guardian<p>

_"Offline."_

_The Doctor looked over at the source of the sound, to see that Rose's lever slowly moved downwards; even as it did, he could see the Daleks' descent into the Void beginning to slow. Then he saw Rose reaching for the lever, trying to grab it and pull it back online while maintaining her grasp on her Magnaclamp; but the Doctor could see that the lever had already moved beyond her reach. Rose realized this too, and before the Doctor could react, before he could protest, she let go of the Magnaclamp and leapt forward, grabbing hold of the lever. But the Void's pull was relentless, and Rose struggled to force the lever back into position._

_The Doctor opened his mouth to shout out in dismay to Rose, but seeing him, she cried, "I've got to get it upright!"_

_Presently, Rose's strength seemed to be greater than the vacuum; she resisted its pull long enough to shove the lever back into a vertical position. As the computer voice said, "Online, and locked," the remaining Daleks flew over the Doctor's shoulder and into oblivion. But he had eyes only for the nightmarish scene taking place across the room from him, only a few paces away, and he was powerless to stop it._

_"My people called it the Void,__" his own voice whispered through some echo of time, __"and it contains absolutely, completely, positively nothing. It's not even empty space, because empty space is something. Even if someone survived the lack of oxygen, they'd go insane in there until they became part of the nothingness. In the end, nothing can survive there, not Daleks, not Cybermen… certainly not-"_

_"Rose, hold on!" he cried, reaching in vain toward her._

_"She had the power of a god once,"__ a future Jack Harkness's voice whispered, __"yet she couldn't save herself in the end?"_

_Rose struggled helplessly, clutching the lever frantically, but the pull proved to be too strong for her; it was as though gravity had rotated to the side, and that lever was her only lifeline. Even from his viewpoint, however, the Doctor could see that Rose's fingers were growing tired, but the vacuum pulled harder than ever._

_Rose's face then turned in his direction, and the Doctor's hearts seemed to stop as he took in her sorrowful expression. All time seemed to slow in that one second, in which Rose's eyes met his._

_"Goodbye, Doctor," she mouthed. Then she surrendered, and let go._

_"Fascinating," the Carrionite mused. "There is no name. Why would a man hide his title in such despair?" Then she grinned, a sudden, cruel glee flashing across her face, and she pointed at the Doctor. "Oh, but look! There's still one word with a power that aches!"_

_"The naming won't work on me," the Doctor told her, his voice intense and wary_.

_He screamed. He screamed her name and reached out to her, hoping against hope that this was just a nightmare, that he would wake up to find her in the library or in her bedroom, perfectly fine, but it was a delusion. It only took a few seconds, but to him it felt like a whole lifetime as Rose was enveloped in white light. Her eyes were shut, but not peaceful; and she fell until all he could see was her hand, still reaching out for him._

_The she was gone. There was a howl, followed by a sigh, the soft rustle of wind blowing back, leaving complete silence as the breach closed. All that remained was a blank, white wall._

_So continued the witch:  
><span>"But your heart grows cold.<span>  
><span>The Howling jaws of Hell await<span>  
><span>The fading Valiant Child's fate.<span>  
><span>Falling, falling, down she goes,<span>  
><span>Falling, the refulgent Rose!"<span>_

The Doctor woke with a start and sat up, looking around the darkness frantically. Then he saw the analog clock he had set up on the wall opposite, and realized that he had been dreaming... But though it was a dream, it also was a memory, his worst memory, apart from the destruction of Gallifrey, playing out in his Doctor placed his head in his hands, as a fresh wave of grief overcame him. He felt the pain of her loss every day, but he hadn't felt it so acutely in a long time.

In the months after that battle, the Doctor truly had wanted to die, for the first time since the Time War, the only other occasion in his whole life. He remembered standing as the Racnoss drowned in the flood, not caring if the Thames swallowed him as well. He remembered allowing the Plasmavore to drain his blood, taking comfort in the coming darkness. He had even pleaded with that Dalek, begging it to kill him, begging for death because every day he thought of Rose and her ultimate fate, Rose, who had saved him from his worst inner demons in the months following the Time War; and he wanted to die too.

"Why do I always survive, when no one else I care about does?" he had screamed to no one, after he left Donna at her home that eventful Christmas day. "I survived the Time War, and found a hand to hold! I would die for her, I _did_ die for her! There was so much I wanted for her, and so much I wanted to do with her! I survive, when I cannot have anything worth living for, AND IT'S NOT FAIR!"

He had frightened Donna that day, because even she could see the instability of his anguished mind. He knew that he had frightened Martha too, repeatedly; but the person he frightened most with his sudden longing for death was himself. Martha, however, proved to be his salvation; her presence, though she could never replace Rose, proved to be a comfort to him. Just having someone nearby who would listen had taught him to give life another chance.

Sighing in resignation, the Doctor reached to his bedside table and opened a drawer. Rummaging around inside until he found what he was looking for, he pulled a handkerchief from within. He wiped the tears from his face and the sweat from his brow, then sat up, suddenly feeling older and more tired than ever. Rose had always made him feel young again, but that blessing was lost.

He stood quietly and quitted the room, making his way through the maze of corridors until he reached the console room, which was only dimly lit. The incident on Midnight, which still chilled him, had left him feeling very drained and withdrawn. A quick glance at the Tardis screen told him that he had slept more than was normal for him: a good seven hours.

"Blimey," he muttered to himself. "Last time I slept that much…"

No sooner had he spoken, when a sudden alarming thought struck him. Perhaps the creature from Midnight had done more damage than he realized. The thought of Donna's reaction to a sudden new face (especially since he hadn't told her about that yet) made him leap up, and he made his way back toward the corridor in search of a mirror.

"You have not regenerated, if that's what's alarmed you," an amused voice said.

The Doctor jumped, and whirling around, he saw an older man standing by the console, a faint, white glow about him, a man the Doctor recognized instantly, but had not seen for centuries. His jaw dropped.

"Hello, Doctor. It's been a very long time, for you, at least." The White Guardian smiled serenely at the Doctor, who recollected himself, and shut his mouth. He shifted on his feet, unsure of how to react to the Guardian's unexpected appearance in his Tardis. The Doctor then stepped back, surveying the visitor: the Guardian was dressed, as usual, entirely in white. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, and a white goatee as well… in fact, he looked exactly as he did when the Doctor first encountered him.

That encounter had launched him into a long, dangerous mission with a new companion, now long dead. The Doctor didn't regret that mission, but the memory of this event, and the few encounters following it, caused him to feel a slight foreboding at the White Guardian's presence.

This caused his intended "Hello" to come out as "What do you want?"

The Guardian looked unfazed by this rude greeting. "I've come her to give you a message and a warning."

"Which is?"

The other paused, and glanced at the Tardis monitor, a contemplative expression on his face. The Doctor waited as the Guardian scrutinized it, his white eyebrows elevated, before he turned back to meet the Doctor's.

"This may or may not be the last time you will ever see me," he began. "You see, the Universe is moving into a new era. The time of the Guardians soon will be over. Until now, time in this reality was very much watched and sometimes tampered with by Gallifreyan civilization. You know, as well as I do, that though they had sworn never to interfere with other species, the Time Lords' presence was both a blessing and a curse to this Universe."

The Doctor frowned, unsure of where this was going.

"But the Time War changed everything," the Guardian continued. "Many of the old rules have been suspended. The time has come for you to move past the Time War, to move on."

A stab of anger flashed through the Doctor.

"Yeah, and where were you throughout all that, Mr. I-will-stop-eternal-chaos White Guardian?" he snapped bitterly. "Fat lot of help you and the Eternals and the Guardians were!"

Again, the Guardian looked unperturbed. "Much as it would have looked that way to a Time Lord, the Time War was not, nor would have led to, _eternal_ chaos. There's much more to the Universe than the flow and regulation of Time, which, if necessary, would have found a suitable replacement for Gallifrey. There is infinitely more to existence and creation than the Time Lords ever could imagine."

The Doctor shook his head indignantly. "The Time Lords were not perfect, but they could survey Time in its entire complexity, and you're saying they only knew a small fraction of what _you_ know?"

The White Guardian shrugged. "The Guardians had foreseen the Time War long ago," he said. "We knew that you would be the one to end it and yet survive. Why else do you think I chose you to search for the Key of Time? You did a very wise thing when you destroyed it. Call it my little test: could you do what was right, choose good over power? That day, you proved your worth."

This did nothing to assuage the Doctor's growing anger. "You knew all that time?" he shouted. "And you gave no warning, did nothing, made no effort to stop it? If Time isn't so important in the grand scheme of things, what was to stop you from preventing it?"

"Yes, we did know all that time," the Guardian replied sternly. "Can you say the same for the Time Lords? Did they foresee it?"

That brought the Doctor up short. He opened and closed his mouth, but had no words.

"The Time Lords brought their fate upon themselves," the Guardian told him. "We were able to overlook their arrogance and complacency in proclaiming themselves as rulers of untamed Time at first. But then they overstepped themselves when they sent you back in time to stop the Daleks from coming into existence, an act which, as you know, induced the Dalek Emperor to declare war."

The Doctor shut his eyes at the memory, feeling an old guilt resurface at his failure in the endeavor. Much as it went against his own principles, and the fundamental rules of time, the Doctor knew full well that had he succeeded in stopping Davros's creation, the Time War would never have happened.

"You never would have succeeded," the Guardian told him, as though he could hear the Doctor's thoughts. "The Time Lords thought they could control time, but they were wrong. When they meddled with time that day, Time got her own back. They only saw the consequences of their actions when the Daleks converged upon Gallifrey." The Guardians' eyes met the Doctor's, and he then said intensely, "You were unique among the Time Lords, but in all your travels, after all you've seen, can you continue to believe that the Time Lords really were everything they claimed to be? Were they actually lords of time? Were they really the oldest and wisest race in the universe? The only difference, Doctor, between humans and Time Lords, is that humans know they are ephemeral."

"Have you come here just to rub the war in my face?" The Doctor snapped. "Being the only Time Lord left, I'm reminded of it enough without your coming here, thank you!"

The White Guardian raised an eyebrow. "The age of the Time Lords is over, but you are _not _the last Time Lord_."_

The Doctor's jaw dropped.

"Do not continue to believe, for one minute, that you and the Master were the only survivors," he continued sternly. "Do not continue to wallow in grief for Gallifrey. You are not the last Time Lord, but you remain unique among them, a misfit who was handpicked as a true champion of existence, chosen from the moment you first looked into the Untempered Schism, from the moment you first were given your true name."

The Doctor shivered, his expression dark and distant.

"As for what I mainly came to inform you," the Guardian continued, "I am here to tell you that you and two others were found who could protect the Universe in this period of uncertainty and transition."

The Doctor hadn't expected that. He frowned, scrutinizing the Guardian, and wondering in annoyance why these eternal entities always had to talk in riddles.

"Who are these others?" he asked.

"They are not Time Lords, but they are both very unique in their own ways." The Guardian smiled at him again, his expression kind, but the Doctor felt more confused than ever. Then the Guardian shrugged, and elaborated, "You have already met them. One is exiled to Earth until he is ready to understand his own calling and responsibility; other than that, you need not worry about him. The other, however, is currently imprisoned beyond space-time," the Guardian's smile faded into a serious expression, "and in desperate need of your help."

The Doctor lowered himself onto the captain's chair, and he turned away, opting to look at the Time Rotor.

"The Time War ended a long time ago," he finally said apprehensively. "Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because you wouldn't have responded to it so well as you have today," the Guardian replied, "but more importantly because the new era is beginning now. You will imminently find yourself in a position true to your title, that will stretch you past the breaking point. The third's reappearance in your life will undoubtedly be a great emotional shock to you, but your friend is in desperate need of assistance, and was put in that situation a very long time ago by a race that soon will replace the Daleks as your most dangerous enemies."

Once the Guardian had uttered these words, the Doctor turned to look at him again. "Who is this person?" he inquired uneasily. "And what is this race?"

"You will know, when the time comes," the Guardian said evasively, playing with his sleeve. Then he looked away, his expression distant. "My time here has run its course. Prepare yourself, Doctor. The Age of the Time Lords is over. The Age of the Perennials begins _now._"

Then with those enigmatic words, the White Guardian faded from view, leaving a very confused Time Lord. The Doctor stared after him, his mind spinning, unsure of what action to take or what to think. But before he could come to any conclusion thereof, a loud trill coming from the controls interrupted his racing thoughts.

Martha Jones's phone was ringing.

* * *

><p><strong>AN:**

**When I announced the revisions, I said that I'd update weekly, but now I'll amend that to updating any time I finish two chapters of the "Cypnov" revision (weekly if I'm unable to). I want to be as far along with "Cypnov" as possible when I finish posting "Eve of the Eternal."**


	4. Chapter Three: Torchwood One Revisited

.

Chapter Three  
>Torchwood One Revisited<p>

The rain, now pouring upon London harder than ever, did nothing to extinguish the flames, but though they still burned, and had already consumed several floors above the original five, firefighters and soldiers alike had immediately proceeded to evacuate the tower and relocate the injured. Captain Erisa Magambo watched from underneath her hood as several helicopters circumambulated the tower, hovering above the upper floors in search of those who had been trapped up there. Her radio crackled, but no voice sounded, and she thought nothing of it. She then checked her watch, and cursed loudly. A soldier looked at her curiously.

"Where is Dr. Jones when we need her?" she grumbled. Another gurney bearing a prone body rolled past her. Magambo had long since stopped looking at the many injured personnel. There was no point. They all looked the same: the gruesome image of burning, bleeding pain, some with their eyes shut, opting for unconsciousness, others crying out or panting in agony. Several doctors and ambulances from hospitals all over London had arrived, but they needed coordination, especially when working with the soldiers. They needed Dr. Jones.

Her radio buzzed. "Base to Magambo."

She pulled it from her belt and replied, "Magambo here."

"Colonel Mace is arriving now."

Magambo sighed in relief. She looked across the muddy lawn to the gate, where she saw a jeep parking just past the security checkpoint. Drawing her hood more tightly, she made her way across the debris-littered grass as a tall, balding man in an olive-green uniform clambered out of the jeep and pulled on a raincoat. Behind him emerged a dark woman in a black uniform, bearing a tag emblazoned with the Red Cross.

"Sir!" she called, giving the colonel a salute.

"Captain Magambo," Mace greeted, giving her a curt nod. "What's the report?"

"We're still evacuating the building," Magambo said, as Mace looked upwards at the burning floors. "As you can see, the fires haven't been extinguished yet. There's about fifty of our personnel trapped in the upper floors. The firefighters say that the explosion was on the nineteenth floor. We don't know the cause yet."

Mace nodded grimly. "Casualties?"

"Fifteen dead," Magambo said quietly. "Last I was told, we had nineteen injured. There are still a few missing."

He nodded. "You already have assigned some men to conduct an investigation, I trust, once the tower's clear?"

Magambo replied in the affirmative, and then turned to the other member of Mace's party. "Dr. Jones, we've reserved the ambulances for life-threatening injuries, given the rush, but those with serious but non-fatal injuries were sent over there."

She pointed at a Red Cross cubicle set up nearby. Martha nodded. "I'm on it."

Colonel Mace held her back for a moment. "I'll need you back here later, Dr. Jones," he said. "Someone will inform you when the Torchwood team arrives."

Martha raised an eyebrow. Magambo added, "Given that Torchwood had all sorts of alien devices and machines stored inside, we decided that we might need the input of the only remaining Torchwood operation. We got in touch with Captain Harkness, and he and his team will be here in half an hour."

Martha smiled, glad that even under the circumstances, she'd see them again. She looked at the cubicle. "I'd better go."

As she departed, Magambo turned back to the colonel. "What are they telling the public?"

"Nothing as yet," he admitted, grimacing. "Only that the situation appears to be under control, and there's no indication that terrorism was involved." He sighed. "Some people are already starting to speculate on that."

Magambo groaned. "I suppose it's possible that someone planted a bomb, gut we keep the building under 'round the clock surveillance. I think it's much more likely that something of Torchwood's was the cause, though how it happened…"

She shrugged helplessly. Mace merely looked at the building somberly.

* * *

><p>"Wow," muttered Jack as he squinted through the windshield, a difficult task due to the bucket-loads of water that poured down upon them. It was the only window that gave a clear view of the city. "The Thames doesn't look good. Good thing you decided to take this highway."<p>

Ianto Jones glanced in the direction Jack indicated, surveying the police barriers on both sides of the Thames. The river was rising to a dangerous level.

"Been a long time since I last saw it rain this hard," Jack said. "It's like July in the Boeshane Peninsula. Or like that TV movie that was on last week."

Gwen snorted. "You mean 'Flood?' That film left me feeling cold for days."

"Well, there's the turnoff," Jack announced, twisting the steering wheel.

The SUV sped down the exit. About an hour earlier, just before Ianto re-entered the Hub from his lunch, Jack had received a phone call from UNIT, and immediately after hanging up he halted Gwen on her way out. The moment Ianto walked in, Jack dragged him into the SUV, and suddenly they headed out for London. As they turned a corner and slowed, the skyscraper at Canary Wharf came into view. Jack whistled when he saw the smoke billowing out from the middle floors. The others said nothing. Jack glanced at Ianto, who had been unusually subdued ever since he heard about the explosion.

"You all right?"

Ianto nodded. "Yeah. Sorry, it's been a long time since I was back here. Wouldn't have cared if I never saw Torchwood Tower again."

He fell silent again, but the others understood. The last time Ianto had set foot in Canary Wharf, he had dragged his girlfriend Lisa from a Cyberman conversion chamber on August 8th, 2007, though she was halfway through the process of upgrading. The sight of the tower brought Ianto back to the carnage of that day, the clash of steel with steel, cybernetics with cybernetics, the loss of almost all his colleagues. On this stormy day, Ianto Jones was needed at the sight of his former employment, but he didn't want to be anywhere near it.

Ten minutes later, the SUV pulled into a parking lot filled with UNIT vehicles. The asphalt was littered with ash and debris, and closer to the tower entrance, two persons in uniform awaited their arrival. As soon as Jack found an empty space to park and pulled his keys from the ignition, the colonel and the captain strode across the lot toward them.

"Captain Jack Harkness?" inquired Colonel Mace, raising his hood to look at Jack properly, as soon as he clambered from the driver's seat.

"That's me," Jack confirmed.

Mace gave him a salute. "Colonel Alan Mace. Thank you for coming."

Jack returned the salute. "We're used to being in a hurry," he said. "It's a pleasure." This earned him a slight scowl from his teammates, but Magambo and Mace remained oblivious.

"You are familiar with Torchwood Tower?" Magambo asked.

Jack shook his head. "Not exactly. I've been stationed at the Cardiff branch for years, but Ianto worked for the London branch. He might be able to tell you more about the place."

Ianto stepped forward, and both officers turned to look at him expectantly. "Ianto Jones," he said quietly. Mace scrutinized him for a moment, before turning and jerking his head toward another cubicle set up closer to the tower. The UNIT insignia was stitched to the front. "Come on then," he said, "Let's get out of the rain. Magambo, send for Dr. Jones."

Jack looked pleased at this. Magambo pulled out her radio and called Martha to the officers' cubicle. Both she and Mace then turned and led the Torchwood team to said cubicle. Mace lifted the tent flap and showed them in. A rather comfortable makeshift room had been set up inside, with some camp chairs flanking a card table, and in the corner a heater and a few lamps had been set up as well. Gwen sighed in relief and pulled her hood down, before taking a seat by the heater.

"So, do you know what caused it?" asked Jack, now sounding rather serious.

"Not yet," Magambo replied, taking a seat at the card table, directly across from Jack. "We've only just finished evacuating the lower floors. The fires aren't out yet, but I've just had word from the fire chief that it should be safe to investigate the explosion within the hour. Some of them are still worried about the tower's structural integrity, though. They want a closer study of it."

"There's no need," Ianto suddenly remarked. All eyes turned to him, and he shrugged. "One Canada Square's a famous landmark. After 9/11, Torchwood had the tower's framework reinforced, in case of a similar attack. The structure could withstand a nuclear explosion—well, perhaps not if directly hit," he corrected, seeing the others' incredulous faces, "but the point is, the tower's not going to collapse, if that's what you're thinking."

Mace let out a relieved sigh. "That's one less thing to worry about, then."

At that moment, the tent flap opened again, and Martha walked in. Before she could take in her surroundings, Jack pulled her into a tight hug. "Glad to see you're joining the party," he said happily.

"Good to see you too, Jack." Martha sounded amused, but although she, and everyone else who knew Jack well, was sure that he was only acting cheerful. She'd seen enough of false cheer when she was with the Doctor to recognize it instantly. But after a quick hug to Gwen and a nod to Ianto (who remained in subdued silence), her superior officers began before she could worry more about Jack.

"Let's get down to business, then." Mace motioned to the remaining empty seat, which Martha took. Glancing at Ianto and Jack, he thus addressed the Torchwood team, "As you probably know, this entire area has been under UNIT's control ever since the massacre here two years ago. Captain Magambo has been overseeing the operations for the past year."

Ianto nodded glumly.

"There was a lot of damage after the battle, of course," Magambo added. "The Daleks and the Cybermen tore the facility apart, but we had the place cleaned up within a couple of months. We've spent the rest of the time sorting through the many alien artifacts which Torchwood had accumulated."

Jack frowned. "I had the Cardiff team clear the artifacts out of the tower and stored them in Cardiff."

Martha rolled her eyes. "Come on, a team of half a dozen, clearing out the entire tower before UNIT took control?"

"You didn't get everything," Magambo told him. "A lot of the remaining artifacts were damaged, some weren't but more often than not, we were unable to identify them or their properties."

"That's no surprise," Ianto said. "Recovering, analyzing, and using alien artifacts was a process that could take years. First we'd have to acquire it, then we'd have to fix it and see if it did anything. Then we'd analyze its functions. That done, we'd use the newly acquired knowledge to reverse engineer it. By the time of the battle, we'd had a few successes: particle guns, Magnaclamps, hovercrafts, laser cannons, the like. But there were hundreds of artifacts that never got past the analysis stage."

Magambo sighed. "I was afraid you'd say that."

Jack stepped in. "That's why you sent for us? Because you believe that one of the damaged or unidentified objects might have caused the explosion."

Ianto's face was grim. "It's probable, unless it was a bomb."

Magambo shook her head. "The whole of Canary Wharf has been under round-the-clock surveillance ever since the Cybermen attacked. We take no chances. I suppose someone could have found their way around it, and we have to consider all possibilities, but this is more likely."

"As soon as the fire chief tells us it's safe, we'll be sending some troops into the tower to investigate," Mace informed the team. "Captain Harkness, I'd like you and Mr. Jones to lead the investigation."

* * *

><p><em>She had crash-landed, just as she had hoped. It would delay re-entry into the abyss. <em>

_But it was not over yet. The monotonous voice had not yet vanished, and now that she could understand the repeating numbers, Rose knew what would happen next. She knew the emergency programming. She knew Eve of the Eternal. _

_But there were fractures in the breach, reaching into all sorts of places, creeping into different time zones, and Rose could hear all sorts of sounds leaking through into her consciousness: conversation, the sounds of nature, white noise, anything that came through. Meanwhile, Eve rapidly began to regain control. Hijacking the ship had taken enormous mental exertion, and while she remained in this state, mental strength was all Rose Tyler had. _

_She needed help, and she would find help if it took the rest of her strength. Those fractures were the channels by which she could call out, lead someone to her, and Eve provided her access, if she could just fight long enough to get a message through. Somewhere, someone was bound to hear her. _

_She shut her eyes, and mastered the framework. _

"_Listen," a new voice called out. _

_Rose opened her eyes, startled. _

"_Listen, there's this woman, gonna come along, this tall blonde woman called Sylvia. Tell her, that bin there. All right? It'll make sense. That bin there."_

_Rose blinked. She could still see the library, but there was another image flashing before her eyes, the transparent apparition of a street corner, where a woman with ginger hair was talking to a dark gentleman close by, pointing at a dust bin. Rose's strength began to drain away. The red-haired woman then turned around, a radiant smile stretched across her face. Then the woman looked directly at Rose, and her smile faltered._

_Rose stared back, feeling Eve intercepting the transmission. Her resilience was waning, but still she fought back. Whoever this woman was, someone would hear her call, and that was an encouraging thought. _

_Ten thousand years a slave, but no more._

* * *

><p>Half an hour passed, and in spite of his earlier cheer, Jack now stared out at the tower from the tent entrance, his expression inscrutable. Martha stepped beside him, looking worried. "You all right?"<p>

He nodded. "It's not easy to come her for some of us. I try to act cheerful; it's easier than dwelling too much on what happened here. This is especially hard on Ianto. You could see that."

"Yeah, I'm told that he lost his girlfriend here."

"You could say that." Jack glanced at the parking lot, where Ianto was standing, talking to Colonel Mace in hushed tones. Ten minutes earlier, Magambo had left to assemble a UNIT team for Jack to work with; Gwen had gone with her, leaving the officer's tent except for Jack and Martha; with the others gone, he had dropped his false cheer.

"All of us lost someone that day," Martha reflected. "My cousin Adeola… wonder if Ianto knew her. They recovered her body, so at least we had a funeral, but we weren't permitted to see it."

Jack nodded sympathetically. He hesitated, then told Martha, "After we got back from the Valiant, I did some research, dug up statements, looked at recordings from security cameras… you know. Your cousin died on the top floor just feet away from the breach the Cybermen came through. They did something to her…"

Jack didn't elaborate, something Martha was half-thankful for. Adeola's death still was painful for her to remember. She'd seen her cousin less than an hour before it happened; they'd had lunch together with Tish.

"Rose died up there too," Jack added solemnly. "In the same room. It was caught on film… she was the last casualty."

Martha looked at him sympathetically. "I don't know if you knew… there's a plaque that UNIT made commemorating her. I didn't think very kindly of her when I traveled with the Doctor, but I didn't know… he didn't talk much about it."

Jack shut his eyes, looking terribly sad. "She gave her life to save everyone. It's how she would have wanted to go, but that doesn't make it any less painful. She deserved more than a name on a plaque."

At that moment, Ianto returned. "Jack, Magambo's on her way back. She's got a dozen soldiers that she's placing under your command for the day. You and Martha had better come."

"Oh, good, I haven't commanded troops since World War II," Jack remarked, returning to his tone of false cheer. He dashed outside, grinning, and Martha just managed to keep up.

* * *

><p><em>The transmission channel had closed, and Rose stepped back, wearied by the struggle she'd made to keep it open; but she'd managed to call out a few times, and could not afford to stop. Every fiber of her being, or what was left of it, was screaming for release. She would never stop, never falter, determined to break out of it took a million years. <em>

"_I recognize you."_

_Rose leaped up and wheeled around startled by the quiet statement, the all-too familiar mechanical voice that had uttered it. Standing exactly where the hologram of the redhead had been moments before, was a tall mechanical humanoid, made entirely of steel, with empty eyes and what looked like handlebars flanking the sides of its head. The Cyberman looked directly at Rose, who backed away in shock. _

"_How did you get here?" she whispered. "You're dead. You're all dead. I saw it. We made sure of it."_

_The Cyberman ignored the question. "I recognize you," it repeated. "Your name is Rose Tyler." _

_Rose said nothing. Her thoughts were spinning as she tried to work out how a Cyberman could be standing there. For so long, there had been nobody except herself and Eve; this was a different reality, untouched by all the old threats, inaccessible. _

"_I told you, didn't I?" the Cyberman uncharacteristically demanded, distracting Rose from her thoughts._

_She blinked. "Come again?"_

"_I told you that if you kept on traveling, you'd keep changing." The Cyberman stepped forward, its metal finger pointing at Rose in almost an accusing manner. "Look at you! I warned you. I knew that traveling with the Doctor would destroy you in the end! Did you ever listen?"_

_It was then that Rose recognized the Cyberman. Her eyes widened as the terrifying, painful memory struck her: "Now I am Cyber form. Once I was Jacqueline Tyler."_

"_Mum?" she breathed, terrified. _

_If at all possible, the Cyberman's voice turned angry and disgusted. _

"_Look at what's become of me!" it shouted. "Look at what you've done!"_

"_What do you mean?" Rose backed into the wall, feeling sick. _

"_You picked an alien, time-traveling stranger over your own family!" it snarled. "You abandoned me in another universe! You didn't save me! I've been upgraded, and you didn't save me! Look at me! I told you that the Doctor would destroy you, and you've dragged me down with you! You're no better than him!"_

"_Mum!" Rose cried, feeling the sting of guilt as the Cyberman advanced on her, its arm raised, fingers stretched out threateningly, poised to electrocute her. She felt tears sting her eyes, opening her mouth, but no further words came. She had nothing, no cry of protest, no apology, no plea for forgiveness. Her throat tightened, and she covered her mouth to stifle a sob._

_But how could this be? The rational side to Rose reared up in defense of the unexpected assault. The Cybermen were dead, and her mother was safe… this was completely impossible. Jackie Tyler who had become a Cyberman was long dead, and had never known Rose, had never had children, was not, was never Rose Tyler's mother. This was wrong. _

_Rose looked up at the advancing Cyberman. "I deny your existence!"_

_The Cyberman promptly vanished, leaving Rose to slide to the floor, her face in her hands. That vision was not real, her mother was safe, and would never have said those terrible things, not to Rose; but she was conscious of the agony she must have put Jackie through, especially now, when there was no chance of them ever seeing each other again, and thus the guilt still burned Rose's conscience, and achieved exactly what Eve had hoped for. Rose had faltered, and thus was set back from her chance at freedom._

* * *

><p>The world is full of rules, which paradoxically are a necessity for freedom. Were it not for rules, the world would fall into chaos, and there is no freedom in chaos. While some rules are less important to keep order than others, one is absolutely essential when it comes to the dignity of men, and that is never to allow Captain Jack Harkness to command your troops.<p>

However little known the necessity of this guideline may be to those like Captain Erisa Magambo upon first meeting Captain Jack, its importance is familiar enough to his own team, who only need experience with his mannerisms to understand why.

"Okay, listen up!"

A dozen soldiers, dressed in black uniforms with red caps, all stood to attention. Jack surveyed the group with a raised eyebrow, a small smirk playing at his lips.

"Actually get to be a captain for once?" Martha said in a low voice so only Jack could hear her. Jack shot her a quick expression of mock hurt.

"I'll have you know that I actually was a captain once," he muttered back.

"Never mind your nonexistent resume," Martha shot back. Jack shrugged, and turned back around.

"Okay, listen up!" he repeated, raising his voice again. He started to walk past the soldiers as the lined up. "My name is Captain Jack Harkness. Captain Magambo is temporarily placing you under my command. We've just received word that the fire has died down enough for us to safely search for survivors on the floors that received the most damage, and to find the source of the explosion." He paused in front of a large, burly soldier who stood a head taller than him. "What is your name?"

The soldier saluted him. "Chris Dynhart, sir."

Jack nodded at Dynhart appreciatively. Martha repressed a groan. A glance at Ianto told her that he was simply relieved that Jack had refrained from wolf-whistling, or something else unbecoming of the rank he had just been granted. Instead, Jack asked "How long have you been under Magambo's command?"

"Two months, sir," came Dynhart's curt reply.

"So you're familiar with Torchwood Tower?"

"Somewhat, sir."

Gwen appeared at Martha's side. "What's going on?"

Martha gave Gwen a long-suffering look. "Jack's having fun with the soldiers," she muttered irritably.

"You're aware, then, of all the Torchwood equipment stored in the labs?" When Dynhart replied so, Jack turned to the others. "When up in the tower, you are to report anything unusual you see, or anything you haven't seen before, but _don't _touch anything. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir!" the soldiers replied in unison.

Under the pretense of giving further instruction to Martha and his team, he turned around, and grinned. "I could do this all day," he mouthed.

Gwen sighed as Martha hissed, "Enjoying yourself?"

Jack ignored her. "Soon as I'm done here, I'll split them up between us; you'll each be in charge of a group." He then looked back at the soldiers, and continued pacing past the soldiers. "Anything you find, you are to report to me or Ianto. I repeat, do not touch anything. Report to us even if you just have a hunch." He then turned to look at the soldier he was about to pass, and paused again, frowning, as though he recognized him, but couldn't quite remember why. What was rare, was that Jack's narrowed eyes indicated that his impression of this particular soldier wasn't a recommending one.

"You," he said, his voice suddenly sharp.

"Sir." The soldier, a dark-haired man with a small nose and plastic-framed glasses, saluted Jack, like Dynhart, only this time Jack, rather than appear approving, assumed the rather startling air of a drill sergeant.

"What's your name?" he demanded.

"Stone, sir. James Stone."

Jack's jaw tightened. "Go by Jimmy, I suppose?"

"Yes sir," Stone dutifully replied. To everyone's surprise, Jack's eyes flashed with anger for a second, and he looked Stone up and down, almost as though he were sizing him up. The soldier looked surprised and a little wary of Jack's scrutiny, but kept his gaze fixed forward.

"When did you join UNIT, soldier?" Jack demanded.

"A year ago, sir."

"What was your job before that?"

"I was a salesman, sir."

"A salesman, huh? Selling what, exactly?"

"Sir?"

"What were you selling? Shoes? Ice cream? Cocaine? Can't tell me? Or you won't?"

"No, sir." Stone now began to look indignant.

Jack glared at him. "I've got my eye on you, Private Stone." He then looked away. "Right!" he said loudly, as though nothing had happened. "According to the fire brigade, the explosion occurred on the nineteenth floor, and the fire has spread from there to floor twenty-six. Whatever caused it will be somewhere in that area."

Now at the end of the line closest to Martha, Jack turned to her abruptly, and discreetly gestured at Stone. "What is he doing here?"

His quiet but caustic voice startled Martha. "He's under Magambo's command. I don't know."

"No," Jack whispered, "what is he doing at UNIT? Why was he recruited?"

Martha shrugged. "How should I know? I don't have access to their records, except medical records. Why? Do you know him?"

Jack merely glowered at her, and turned back to the soldiers, ignoring the object of his inexplicable ire. "Do I need to repeat myself?" he asked them, his earlier cheer completely abandoned.

As he continued describing their mission, Martha turned to Gwen and Ianto.

"What was all that about?" she asked, but Gwen looked as bewildered as Martha felt, and Ianto shrugged.

"There's a lot Jack doesn't tell us," he said quietly.

"Clearly," Martha muttered.

"You are split into two groups," Jack continued, "each under the supervision of one of the four of us. Remember, floors nineteen through twenty-six."

Jack turned around, and pointed at the two standing closest to him. "You two with me, you two with Ianto, you two with Gwen…" He moved back down the line, closer to where he had started, until the entire squad had been split into four distinct groups. He then stopped pacing, then turned to look at them. "Well, what are you all waiting for? Get going!"

* * *

><p><strong>AN:**

**I am not as familiar with the Torchwood series, so I apologize for any inaccuracies I may have put in here. **

**As always, I welcome constructive feedback, and for those of you who didn't read the original, I'm interested in hearing your theories about what's happening to Rose. Especially since that will start to become more clear in the next chapter. **

**Keep an eye out for the next chapter, and have a happy Thanksgiving!**


	5. ChapterFour: Dimension Transcendentalism

.

Chapter Four:  
>Dimensional Transcendentalism<p>

_Every fight, every effort, every struggle took a toll on her. This last encounter with ghosts of her past had shocked Rose so badly that she still knelt on the floor in a daze. She ran her fingers through her hair distractedly, still dwelling on the Cyber Jackie's cruel words, tired of the struggle, fatigued by the guilt and by desperation, and for a time, she just sat there, still stunned, for longer than she could be really aware. _

_When she recovered, she looked up and scrambled to her feet with a yelp. The library was gone; instead she was standing before an iron cage in a room with concrete walls, and inside the cage lay a gray wolf. The animal's eyes were shut, almost peacefully, its thorax rising and lowering softly, but Amaranthine noticed that it did not look healthy at all. On the contrary, it was very thin, and was quivering, as though it were cold and in pain, and fur had fallen out in places. But what truly alarmed Amaranthine was what stood outside the cage: a giant black scorpion, as large as the wolf, staring directly at its captive. Its pincers were moving up and down in a slow, almost relaxing rhythm, and it seemed to be emitting a strange crooning sound, as though it were lulling the wolf to sleep. _

_But Amaranthine's surprised shout had roused the wolf. Its eyes opened, somewhat glazed, and it stood shakily, taking in its surroundings. The almost peaceful expression on its face had vanished. It looked alarmed at first as it looked at the iron bars. Then its eyes fell on the scorpion, which had stopped humming, and now was standing very still. _

_The wolf bared its teeth, absolutely incensed, and with a terrible snarl it launched itself at the barks of the cage, determined to get out and unleash some form of retribution upon the scorpion. But the bars held it back, and the wolf snapped at the scorpion through the gaps in the bars, but was unable to fit through itself. The scorpion drew back in alarm, before raising its pincers menacingly. Then its tail arched over its back, poised to strike. _

"_No!" Amaranthine cried, but the sting snapped forward, striking the wolf's shoulder. The wretched creature let out a sickening howl and fell back, whimpering, nursing its wound. The scorpion slowly raised its tail again, ready to strike a second time should its victim attempt to escape again. _

_Horrified, Amaranthine cried out again, and the scorpion turned to face her, tail poised, ready to strike. _

_Rose sat up with a start, and realized she was on the floor of the library, back from the realm of the subconscious. _

* * *

><p>The team of soldiers Magambo had assembled for Jack was delayed again on their way into the tower, held up by a group of tired-looking firefighters in the lobby, all of whom were covered in ash and grime, and had faces as grim as the thunder and rain outside. Their leader was a tall man with a bushy moustache standing by the reception desk, who walked up to Jack and held out his hand as the soldiers approached.<p>

"Marcus Keele," he greeted. A quick look at his badge told Jack that he was the fire chief. "I take it you're Captain Harkness."

Jack replied that he was, and shook Keele's hand.

"Colonel Mace told me to meet you here. We're to help your team out upstairs. The damage is pretty heavy, and you need us to steer your soldiers clear from the danger zones. Some of my men say that the floor might have collapsed in one or two of the floors."

"You say that Floor 19 was where the explosion took place?" When Keele nodded, Jack asked, "I don't suppose you found anything while you were up there?"

The firefighter snorted. "There's a lot of odd stuff in this tower. I saw things up there like nothing I've ever seen, and Mace warned us not to mess with any of it. If the explosion was caused by one of those things, you're looking at the wrong area of expertise. It's what you're here for, isn't it?"

Jack sighed. "It's going to be a long day."

Keele reached into a sack on the desk and pulled out a few breathing masks, which he started passing out to the soldiers. "The windows were all blasted out," he informed them, "so the worst of the fumes are gone, but there's still the fiberglass and white asbestos particles from insulation. Once you're in floors 19 through 26, don't take the masks off for any reason. If you must remove them, leave those floors. Enough people have been sent to the hospital already."

Martha frowned as Keele handed her a mask. "Are you sure this is safe?"

"It isn't," he said bluntly. He turned back to the soldiers. "We also need a group of you to search the floors above twenty-five, which we haven't completely covered. We've received several phone calls from people who are trapped up there."

In the next few minutes, Jack showed Keele how the soldiers had all divided into groups of two, and in response, the latter likewise divided up the firefighters; at least two were to accompany each set of soldiers.

On the nineteenth floor ten minutes later, Dynhart wandered around a wrecked office, surveying the damage. The fire, now extinguished, had consumed the entire room: the walls, the carpet, and the ceiling had all burned black; scorched plaster tiles had fallen from the ceiling, exposing insulation and pipes, one of which had broke and was dripping water. The shock of the explosion had knocked smaller objects across the room, including wrecked computer equipment and knickknacks, some of which lay in puddles of melted plastic. Office chairs had been reduced to ash and foul-smelling burnt plastic, and pieces of broken glass and plaster littered the floor. The only sound in the office, apart from muffled footsteps in the next room, was the soft murmur of the wind, bringing cold air through the shattered windows.

"Dynhart, where'd you go?"

Dynhart turned, startled by the sudden voice, as a second soldier named Anthony Threet entered the room, followed by a firefighter and Gwen.

"There you are," Threet said, his voice muffled slightly by his mask. "You're not supposed to wander off unaccompanied, you know. Still, did you find anything?"

"You're looking at it," Dynhart replied sarcastically. "Shrapnel, lots of it."

Threet shrugged. "If I remember right, there's a laboratory over this way."

He crossed the room and entered another doorway (the door had been blasted off its hinges), which led down a hallway. The firefighter ran close behind.

"Let me go in first," he said irritably.

"Sure thing, sergeant," Threet replied. "What was your name again?"

"Chapman," came his curt reply. "And you're supposed to be following me, not the other way around."

"Yeah, Threet, whatever happened to following the rules?" Dynhart smirked, and followed Chapman into the hallway, Gwen close behind. At the other end, another door had been blasted open, and the three of them entered the room and shone their flashlights.

"Seems you were right about the lab," Gwen commented. She waved her flashlight around, scrutinizing the room. "And I think we've found the right location."

They were standing in a large room, also blackened by the flames, which was in even worse shape than the outside rooms; all of the ceiling tiles had fallen out, and some of the exposed wires had frayed; several were emitting angry white sparks. Tables and chairs had overturned and everywhere they looked, they saw glass phials and beakers that had shattered. There was computer equipment and broken microscopes scattered across the room as well. All of the smashed equipment seemed to have been thrown centrifugally from a sinister-looking sphere in the center of the room, covered with sharp spines, which lay on the floor. A bent tripod, which perhaps had once served at its stand, lay nearby. The sphere, about a foot in diameter, had split open and was smoking slightly.

"Watch out for the cables," Chapman warned as Dynhart approached the sphere.

"I remember this thing," he said, bending over it. It was filled with blackened metal circuits and sizzling wires. "We called the Echidna from Hell. They must have brought it up from storage for analysis. Didn't know it could explode, though."

"Clearly no one did." Threet scratched his head thoughtfully. "They wouldn't have left it here otherwise."

Gwen pulled out her radio. "Jack, this is Gwen speaking."

They waited a moment. Then Jack responded, "Hello, Gwen. What's up?"

Gwen glanced at the sphere. "I think we've found it. We're in a laboratory on Floor 19."

* * *

><p>Ten minutes later, Threet led Jack into the room, and Ianto and Martha, who had apparently rushed from their areas in response to Gwen's message, closely followed him. Threet pointed at the device.<p>

"The Devil's Sea Urchin?" asked Ianto, surprised. "I didn't know it was a bomb. I don't think Torchwood did either."

"It's not," Jack said, but he looked contemplative. "That's a Delminiran power cell; it's basically their starship equivalent for a car battery."

The soldiers stared at him.

"How did you know that?" asked Dynhart.

"I've seen them before," Jack said lightly, bending over it. "It's enormously potent, and a bit touchy. If you hit one of these with a strong enough force, it could explode."

"What could have set it off?" asked Gwen. "Did it fall on the floor, or something?"

"No. That's what's weird." Jack looked around the room for anything that could have struck the cell. "It would explode if you threw it in front of a lorry or out the window, but nothing in here could have hit it hard enough."

"What's with the spines?" asked Martha curiously.

"Anti-theft device," Jack replied, shrugging. "Anyway, yeah, this is what exploded, but now we should be worried about what exploded it, and I don't see any lorries in here."

At that moment, their radios crackled again. "Wood to Mr. Jones."

Dynhart passed his radio to Ianto. "Jones here."

"Stone and I are on Floor 26. We've run into a problem."

* * *

><p>"Oh my God," Martha whispered, gaping at the scene before them: there was no ceiling; extending beyond the room she stood in, it had caved in completely, and though there was no fire, the place had been completely wrecked. Plaster, wires, pipes, even some of the metal beams from the tower's interior structure had fallen out, as though there had been an earthquake, and before them was a gaping hole, extending at least a few floors above them. Martha counted to Floor 34.<p>

"We were sent to look at floor 27 and discovered that the floor was gone," Jimmy Stone told them, glancing at Jack nervously as he spoke. "As far as we can tell, it goes down at least three floors, maybe four."

"Stone nearly fell in it," said Dave Wood, a stocky black soldier who stood next to Stone. "It looks as though something fell through here."

"Whatever happened up here must have set off the explosion downstairs," Ianto assessed, looking at Jack.

The latter looked at Keele angrily. "Why didn't you mention this before?"

"I told you that we thought the ceiling had collapsed in a couple of the floors," the firefighter retorted. "At the time the place was full of smoke; they probably couldn't see just how deep the hole was. I hadn't seen this until now!"

"What _did _that?" Gwen asked, utterly astonished. "What could spontaneously fall through _eight_ floors and set off an explosion _five_ floors below that?"

As one, they all looked either to Keele or to Jack for an explanation. Keele looked as bewildered as any of them, but Jack was staring off into space, frowning slightly.

"Jack?" asked Martha quietly.

"Can't you hear it?" he asked.

"Hear what?" asked Wood.

Ianto frowned too. "I hear it."

"Hear what?" Stone asked impatiently.

"Private Stone, I take great delight in saying this," Jack said irritably. "Shut up and listen!"

Stone fell silent, and then Martha heard it. A low, periodic hum, so soft that she might not have noticed had Jack not pointed it out. It sounded every few seconds, almost like a pulse, each hum lasting three or four seconds, ending on an even lower pitch. It was a sound that reminded Martha of the noises spaceships made in sci-fi shows.

Without a word to anyone, Jack set off across the room toward the sound, kicking aside shrapnel as he went, and everyone followed him, still listening to the pulse. Nobody said a word as they wandered down the adjacent hallway, as the sound grew louder, and then Jack paused.

"In here," he said, indicating the end of the hallway, where the doorway had collapsed, leaving an opening. "Ianto, come with me."

The two men entered the room, and everyone waited outside. Then they heard Ianto's exclamation: "What the hell is that?"

"Don't touch it!" came Jack's voice.

"I wasn't going to!"

Martha and the others followed them in, and were met with an astounding sight. In the middle of the room lay a towering polyhedron (the only accurate word anyone could think of), spherical and yet not, with a diameter of at least twelve feet, right below the hole in the ceiling. It was composed of what looked like translucent blue panels—Martha thought that were the object opaque, it would have been black—which were placed in a three-dimensional pattern of hexagons and pentagons, like a giant football. The pulse it emitted was soft, but its resonation was still heart-stopping.

"Where did this sphere come from?" asked Ianto incredulously. "It wouldn't even fit in the floors up here."

"Well, strictly speaking, it's not a sphere." Jack walked around it as he spoke. "It's a truncated icosahedron."

"A what?" asked Keele, nonplussed.

"That's the soccer ball shape," Jack explained.

"And it wasn't here before?" Gwen asked Ianto.

He, Jack, and the soldiers all shook their heads. "Never seen it before," Ianto answered, "and believe me, I'd notice something like this."

Jack hesitated, then stepped forward, his hand outstretched.

"I thought you said not to touch it!" Keele protested.

Jack shrugged. "I'm a little more indestructible than the rest of you."

He placed his hand on one of the pentagonal panels, and everyone waited with baited breath, but nothing happened.

"It's all right, I think," Jack told them. "It feels like an LCD screen."

He placed his other hand on it, and they noticed that the surface beneath his fingers rippled a little.

"Don't think that's what it is, though," he added, as he moved his hands around the polyhedron, feeling it. The moment he placed his hands on one of the hexagonal panels, however, it fell through, as though Jack had put his hand through some sort of membrane. He jumped back in surprise, and the surface of the hexagon rippled back into shape. "Definitely not liquid crystal."

The others watched curiously as Jack gingerly raised his hand to the panel again, and pressed against it slightly. Again, his hand sunk through; looking more closely, however, they could see that it hadn't appeared on the inside of the semi-transparent icosahedron.

Jack pulled his hand out again, and felt the hexagonal panel above the first; the same thing happened. He then stepped back, and looked at the others.

"Nothing for it," he said. "Whatever this is, it's way beyond Planet Earth, and I'm going to find out all I can about it."

With that, Jack turned around and walked through the hexagonal panels, vanishing from sight.

"Jack!" Martha, Gwen, and Ianto all shouted simultaneously, but their anger and concern at his recklessness proved to be pointless. A second later, Jack's head poked out from the panel; he was grinning maniacally.

"You have _got_ to see this!" he said, looking very excited. "Come on in!"

The others looked at each other. Then Martha hesitated, and followed Jack in, feeling the strange rippling surface gently squeeze her skin as she did. Then she gasped at her surroundings, removing her breathing mask, as Ianto and Gwen appeared beside her, followed by the two soldiers and the fireman. "You have got to be kidding!" she cried.

Gwen gasped too. "It's impossible. This is completely, totally, physically impossible!"

"It's not impossible," Jack laughed. "It's dimensionally transcendental."

"It's bloody bigger on the inside!" Ianto stammered.

He was quite right. They weren't standing in what should have been the dark insides of the polyhedron, but inside a hexagonal room on a floor similar in color to the outside, likewise built with hexagonal tiles. The walls, made of the same liquid crystal-like substance as the outside (only opaque rather than translucent), were black, and lined with gold bands. Beyond Earth physics or not, it was incontrovertible. The 'truncated icosahedron' was indeed bigger on the inside.

Jack crossed the room to a doorway, which, like everything else inside the place, was hexagonal. "Corridor over here," he called. "C'mon! Let's find out who built this."

Martha caught up with him as he strolled down the corridor, where the walls shone with white light, illuminating the place. It stretched for what looked like one to two hundred feet before them, flanked with similar hexagonal doorways.

"They liked hexagons, whoever built this," Gwen commented.

"D'you think it's Time Lord?" asked Martha in a low voice. "It's bigger on the inside… are we in some sort of Tardis?"

Jack shrugged. "Maybe. The Tardis is the only thing I've seen which was like this, but that doesn't necessarily mean that only the Time Lords knew how to do this."

He paused at a doorway and poked his head through, then stepped back. "Just a storage room, by the looks of things," he said. "It's completely empty, though. That's odd. Still, it's the control room I want to see."

As Jack stood there, looking contemplative, Keele finally spoke up from the back.

"I'm in an alien spaceship," he said, an odd look on his face, as though this had just hit him. "Spaceship. Alien Spaceship. Bigger on the inside."

Jack grinned at him. "Welcome to the universe, Marcus Keele."

"Do you think it crash-landed?" asked Martha. "Only how could it have crashed into Canary Wharf without leaving a hole on the outside? Or without anyone seeing it?"

Jack couldn't answer. Instead, he nodded down the corridor. "Let's go. Maybe the control room is down this way. Judging by the shape of that room, and perhaps the shape of the outside, I think that the inside is spherical or something similar, and if it's a sphere, I'll hazard a guess at the control room being at the center of the ship."

They pressed on another twenty or thirty feet, until they passed another doorway, but this time leading down another hall. Jack only spared it a passing glance, but Martha's scream alerted him, and he whirled around to look in the direction she did, and leapt backward with a yelp.

They were looking right into the eye of a Dalek.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Were you expecting that? It's about to get more fun. I have more surprises in store in the next chapter, including a shock for Jack and a blast from the past for Jimmy Stone. After that, it won't be long before the Doctor becomes involved. **

**Originally chapters 3 and 4 were merged into one chapter, but yesterday while I was uploading it I decided to split it and then wait a day to upload the second half. **


	6. Chapter Five: Ship of the Dead

.

Chapter Five  
>Ship of the Dead<p>

Nobody moved. Nor did the Dalek. If he had acted on his first impulse, Jack would have had them all running toward the ship's exit as fast as they could, but something held him back: the Dalek's odd behavior, or lack thereof. The Dalek did not react when they appeared. Its eyestalk was pointed directly at them, but it didn't seem to have noticed them. In fact, it wasn't moving at all. Then Jack noticed that its eye was not shining; the sides of the Dalek's gold casing was blackened, and even stranger was the fine white dust that covered its base and neckpiece, and also the floor surrounding it.

Jack hesitated, but still the Dalek didn't move. Then he whispered, "If it even twitches, run. Don't stop, just get the hell out of here."

He carefully treaded right up to the Dalek, raised a fist, and tapped its dome three times. Nothing happened. Jack raised his hand and brushed some of the dust off the Dalek's head, then sniffed it. His brow furrowed, then he moved around the Dalek, watching it carefully. As soon as he was behind the creature, he relaxed.

"It's all right," he said to the others. "It's dead. Killed. Somebody was well equipped."

Reaching forward, Jack turned the Dalek around, revealing a gaping hole burned in its back. Its inside was coated with the white dust. Martha stepped forward, and also touched the dust. "Is that…?"

"The Dalek creature, or what's left of it." Jack brushed more of the dust off. "Incinerator beam, if I'm right. Hot enough to burn through the armor and reduce the Dalek itself to ash." He paused, then he and Martha joined the others again. "Let's move on, but keep your eyes open. I don't want to be surprised by a live one."

As they walked, Ianto spoke up. "I've seen those things before."

"At Canary Wharf," Jack said in a matter-of-fact tone. "I'd love to know what one was doing on this ship, though. It's not a Dalek ship… at least, I've never seen a Dalek ship designed like this one, and as far as I know, they never figured out how to make things bigger on the inside." He stopped then, and then looked at the others. "Somebody with a rifle should load it and walk ahead of us. Stone, you do it."

"Why me?' asked Stone, glancing back at the dead Dalek.

"One, you're carrying a loaded semi-automatic rifle," said Jack, becoming tetchy. "Two, because I told you to, three, because if we do meet a Dalek or whatever killed it, I want us to start firing before it does, and four, because better you in front than the rest of us."

Martha, Gwen, and Ianto all swallowed, uncertain of how to react, much as they objected to Jack's treatment of Stone. The latter slouched to the front, and snapped at Jack as he went, "What the hell is your problem?"

"Don't talk to your commanding officer like that," Jack retorted.

"You are not my commanding officer," Stone snarled. "I can say what I like. What have I ever done to you?"

"Absolutely nothing," Jack growled, "but it is ironic that of all places for me to run into you, it had to be at Canary Wharf, where the one person we both once knew fought and died, giving her life to save the human race, including your sorry ass. She was as good as a sister to me, but you were no friend to her. Remember? Eight years ago? A girl not yet out of school, from the Powell Estate?"

There was a very tense silence, as Jack looked daggers at Stone, who realized, his face dawning with comprehension and shock, who Jack was talking about. A moment later, his stunned face turned scarlet with anger.

"That's none of your business," he hissed. "She was a bloody b-"

"If you finish that sentence, I'll drag you to Cardiff and feed you to my friend Janet," Jack barked. "Now do what you're told! Go ahead of us!"

Stone scowled, but didn't reply. He obediently pulled out his gun and led the way down the hall. Jack followed, also seething, leaving a very uncomfortable silence in his wake. Gwen and Ianto looked even more confused, but Martha looked comprehending as she realized the implication behind the angry words, and she glanced away from the two men, looking awkward.

The group was completely silent as they walked down the hall after that. They didn't see any more Daleks, dead or alive, as they went, and a few minutes later they reached the end of the corridor, its hexagonal door also sealed with the same membrane-like substance. Stone paused and allowed Jack to march through first, then followed, and the others entered the room behind it.

All of them stood rooted to the spot, stunned at the magnificence of what appeared to be the control room, which was more like a hallway than a room. It was clearly circular and massive, surrounding a cylindrical wall, like a donut, and the walls, navy-blue rather than the black or white they had originally seen, were covered with control panels. Apart from the seven intruders, the place was devoid of any people or Daleks, and the room was completely silent apart from the ship's pulse, which reverberated around the room, giving it a low, eerie echo.

"Right, said Jack, "we'll have a look around. Keele, Wood, you're with me and Martha. Ianto, Gwen, you're with Stone." He pointed to his left. "Go that way. We'll take the opposite. If you see anything operating the controls, don't raise a gun at it. We don't want to appear provocative. Just try to communicate with it, and if it's hostile, run and let me know on the radio. If it's a live Dalek, really run. That's the best advice I can give."

He fell silent, and the others heard a small, high-pitched whine distantly, but growing steadily more audible. They then looked in the direction Jack intended to take his group, and a robot appeared around the bend of the room. It was black and cube-shaped, with the edges of a blue, glowing sphere protruding from the sides slightly. The corners were glowing red. It paused suddenly as it came within ten feet of the party, and then a light shone from its corners and moved across them, scanning them.

Jack raised his hands in the air, as if to convey that they meant no harm, but the cube simply drifted past him and continued down the room, ignoring him completely.

"What was that?" asked Gwen quietly.

"I don't know," he answered, his voice hushed. "Whatever it is, though, it evidently doesn't see us as a threat."

The cube-shaped robot disappeared from sight. Jack inhaled deeply. "Martha, you and I will follow it," he told the party. "Gwen, Ianto, go the other way. Inform us if you see any other cubes, and if they behave any differently from that one."

The others nodded and went down their respective routes. As Jack and Martha started off after the cube, Keele and Wood close behind them, Martha asked, "But do you think it's Time Lord?"

"No idea," Jack said. "Nothing I've seen here is anything like the Tardis, except this ship is bigger on the inside. Also, this place is enormous."

"The Tardis was enormous," Martha pointed out.

"But the console room wasn't nearly this big." Jack nodded at the control panels on the round wall. "I think that's the core of this ship. It seems that this place needs a lot of people and a lot of power to work, whatever it does. I'm not sure if it's a spaceship or a time ship, or whatever, but all the same…"

He paused as another three Daleks came into view, but a quick glance told them that they were as dead as the first they'd found. One was lying on its side, a huge hole burned through its front, one's head was missing, and one had a hole in its back, like the first. The floor around them was covered with the same white dust. The cube they were following moved past the Daleks, ignoring them completely.

"And you said it certainly isn't a Dalek ship?" Martha asked as they too passed the dead Daleks.

Jack shook his head. "Do these controls look like they're designed for Dalek use?"

Martha surveyed the control panel nearest her, which contained a lever, a few switches, some dials, and a few oddly-shaped icons… certainly controls beyond Martha's knowledge, but she knew enough to know that whatever operated the ship needed fingers. Smiling slightly, Martha shook her head.

"Anyway, it's not the right design," Jack continued. "The build is wrong, the architecture's wrong, the outer design is wrong, the ship's ambience is wrong, and the dimensional transcendentalism is wrong. This is no Dalek ship. If you ask me, the place fell under Dalek attack, but whoever built the ship were advanced enough to fight back."

"Maybe it was left over from the Time War," Martha quietly mused. "I dunno. It would explain why there's dead Daleks here."

At that moment, Gwen's voice sounded on Martha's radio. "We've found another two Daleks down this way, also dead. They're in even worse shape than the first. I thought I'd let you know."

Martha pressed the button on hers. "Thanks, Gwen. Carry on."

* * *

><p>There was an intruder. Rose opened her eyes, though she was sure she would fall asleep again any minute. Perhaps she had been more successful than she had thought. Somebody had gotten in. Somebody had heard her call. And so she squinted in the darkness, trying to make out what she could from one of these opposing realities.<p>

Hexagons… they were everywhere, a significant symbol of Taledrev, always part of the architecture. Transcendentally existential vessels were a masterpiece of Taledreven technology, and the full secrets of their operation remained known only to their creators. But Rose, connected to Eve, understood. It certainly was far more sophisticated than the crude imitation that the Daleks had put together, most likely from stolen technology.

The truncated icosahedron was their most common design because the majority of the polyhedron's sides were hexagons, and when two hexagonal panels lined up vertically from a gravitational center, it opened up a doorway. The existence of such a function attested to the inventors' ingenuity and therefore it was very surprising to Rose that somebody had found a way in. Most humans wouldn't have dared to touch the strange object, once they saw it.

Her eyes still shut, Rose concentrated on that world of light and navy-blue walls she sometimes caught flashes of in the corner of her eye, and sitting up so she wouldn't fall asleep, she tried to concentrate on what the security probe had seen. There was a thickset, dark-skinned man in military uniform, and a tall, thinner man wearing what memory told her was the outfit of a firefighter. In front of these two human intruders, she then saw another woman, a black woman with a badge displaying a red cross, a doctor. Then this doctor's friend also came into view, and Rose's eyes snapped open in surprise.

She then closed them again, and looked harder, confirming what her senses were telling her. She then felt something, an emotion she had not felt for a very long time: hope. Someone she knew and thought long dead, someone she recognized and trusted was here, someone who would recognize her.

* * *

><p>The dead Daleks were everywhere. Gwen stared all around her as she wandered down the enormous corridor, a few feet ahead of Ianto and Stone, growing more amazed the more she looked. From what the other Torchwood employees had told her, hundreds of Cybermen and Torchwood soldiers couldn't even bring down four. So what could have so easily butchered what appeared to be dozens of Daleks, maybe more? And where were the people who killed them? Were they the cube-shaped robots? Or were they whoever controlled this ship?<p>

Looking around behind her, Gwen saw Jimmy Stone staring around the room. His face had lost its anger from his earlier argument with Jack, though behind his awe at what he saw around him, he looked sullen. Gwen didn't blame him for being awestruck. In all her time working with Torchwood, she had seen a lot of strange things, beyond the imagination of the average inhabitant of Earth. She had seen people brought back to life, even if only for a few minutes. She had seen aliens, some wandering around sewers, some appearing from the Cardiff Rift. She remembered the Cybermen and their ways, and had heard of the Daleks and _their_ ways.

But this far surpassed anything Gwen had ever seen before. She looked at Ianto, and could only stammer, "This place is incredible."

Ianto swallowed. "It really brings to home how small humans are. For the first time I…" But he fell silent.

"For the first time…?" Gwen encouraged him.

"For the first time it's clear to me how ridiculous and foolish Yvonne Hartman and Torchwood One really were," he stammered. "Whoever built this was from a civilization far greater and superior to our own. It makes me feel so small. And that scares me."

"What were these things, anyway?" asked Stone, interrupting the Torchwood members' conversation. He was scrutinizing a Dalek that had been blown in half, its remains just a few feet from them.

"Not sure, really," Ianto said. "Some sort of alien death machine, although judging from what Jack's said, they're a cybernetic creature. I've seen them before. They were at the Battle of Canary Wharf. I used to work at Torchwood Tower, you know, and I was very lucky to survive. What about you? They spread out across London. Don't you remember?"

Stone shook his head. "I was just about to join UNIT then, only a couple of days from basic training. I'd hidden that day. Cybermen were patrolling the estate."

Ianto shrugged. "Better than where I was. Believe me, that would have been far better than where I was."

He fell silent, and the others said nothing. Stone merely shrugged, but Gwen sighed as she understood what and who Ianto referred to. As he stared off into space, and Stone bent over the Dalek remains, Gwen looked up in time to catch a glimpse of movement, like somebody's shadow, behind a cluster of wrecked Daleks about ten feet away. Glancing at the others, she stepped forward slowly and moved around the metal creatures. Then her eyes fell upon not a robot, as she thought initially, or a Dale, but upon something totally unexpected.

"Ianto!" she hissed in his direction, her eyes not leaving the object of her scrutiny.

Hearing her call, Ianto snapped out of his thoughts and Stone straightened, and they glanced at each other. Stone raised his gun, but Ianto put his hand on his arms. "Jack said no guns. Whatever it is, we shouldn't appear threatening."

Stone didn't look impressed. "What if it's one of those Dalek things?"

"It's not," Ianto told him. "Gwen would already be dead if it was."

Stone scowled, and lowered his rifle. Then they cautiously approached the place where Gwen stood by the Dalek shells, looking in the direction where she stared. Then Stone froze, and Ianto glanced at him, before following his gaze. His mouth fell open in amazement.

There was a human being by one of the control panels, a woman dressed completely in black, bent over the controls with a hand resting on one of the icons. She stood a little more than five feet high, and she had shoulder-length blonde hair which hid her face, but what little skin the could see was very pale, almost chalk-white, which made her hair look almost brown in color.

She either didn't notice them or she completely ignored them, but an involuntary twitch from Ianto caused her to pause, and slowly look up. Gwen had to stifle a gasp when she saw her face: the woman had a cybernetic implant attached to her left temple, which extended above her eyebrow and on her cheek. It appeared to be connected to another implant clasped around her neck like a collar. Wires and tubes extended from the implant, some attached to her scalp, others connected to smaller, similar implants. Gwen could see that one ran down underneath her collar and onto her chest. She also had a mechanical hand, which rested on another icon on the control panel.

But what really alarmed Gwen was the cold, steely look in the woman's eyes, and the lack of expression or emotion on her face. It was a look that reminded Gwen of Ianto's girlfriend Lisa, the Cyberwoman.

The cyborg stared at Gwen for a long time, before saying to herself, "Memory indicates the identity of a terminated Earth sentient. Presence is illogical." The woman's voice was monotonous and half-mechanical, as she clearly was. She then looked at Ianto, but did not spend nearly as much time scrutinizing him, before turning to look at Stone, and Gwen noticed for the first time his reaction to the woman's appearance. To her surprise, his face had turned very white, and his eyes were wide with disbelief. He looked as though he were seeing a ghost.

Then the woman, or cyborg, or whatever she was, spoke again. This time her voice was louder. "Identification: James Stone. Human male. Enemy of the host. Activate defense systems."

Stone backed away in alarm, and Gwen and Ianto looked up in time to see one of the robots suddenly emerge from the liquid crystal-like walls, and point one of its red corners at Stone. Then there was a bright, white hot flash, and a sizzling sound, before the smell of burning flesh met Gwen's nostrils. She blinked, and stared with Ianto in shock at the pile of dust that used to be Jimmy Stone.

A low rumble, like thunder echoed throughout the halls and rooms of the ship, and before anyone could react, the floor shook violently. Ianto was suddenly thrown to the side against the controls, and then backwards onto the floor, while Gwen was flung painfully across a toppled Dalek shell.

The woman, who had gripped the control panel hard to avoid stumbling, then straightened and began moving toward them, her bionic hand outstretched. Gwen and Ianto were quicker. They gave the ash pile only a passing glance as they ran for it. It proved somewhat difficult, as her feet were starting to feel numb from the vibrations, but she nonetheless moved as quickly as she could. The shaking stirred the dust on the floor, causing it waft through the air, clouding their view. The resonance of the ship changed to a faster pulse with a higher pitch. As the neared the exit, Jack and Martha came running toward them, Keele and Wood close behind.

"What was _that_?" Martha demanded as they joined Gwen and Ianto.

Jack looked around. "It sounds like something's activated the ship's protocols. It better not mean that we'll be flung out into space. The science in this ship is way beyond me." Seeing Gwen and Ianto, he then demanded, "What happened to you?"

It was then that Gwen was conscious that she was covered in white dust. Horrified, she began to brush it off, trying to rid her body of the ashes of a dead man. Ianto thankfully was able to answer Jack's question.

"We know what set it off," he gasped, wiping sweat and dust from his forehead. He seemed to be having trouble standing.

"There's something living here," Gwen added shakily. "At least, I think it's alive."

Martha frowned. "Where's Stone? He was with you, wasn't he?"

Ianto shook his head. "He's dead. One of those cube robots incinerated him, like the Daleks. That thing controlling the ship, it proclaimed him an enemy."

"Oh God," Martha breathed.

"What was it?" Jack demanded, his expression alert. "Did you see it?"

"It was… I don't know!" Ianto cried, uncharacteristically panicked. The ship's pulse increased in volume, but the vibrations slowed. Then a clangor sounded throughout the ship, like an alarm. Jack glanced at the controls, before turning to the others. "I think we've stayed too long," he said. "I don't know what's happening, but we're getting out of here now."

No sooner had he spoken, when Wood cried, "Sir!"

They turned, and Gwen saw the cybernetic woman come into view, moving toward them. Her features were blurred by the dust, but it was unmistakably her. Ianto swore, and as she came into better view, Gwen told Jack hastily, "Run. She killed Stone. We've got to get out of here."

Jack didn't move a muscle. His eyes had widened, and his face went as white as Stone's had, when he saw her. This time the woman didn't analyze them. Her eyes fell upon Jack, and then another cube appeared. Another beam of burning light fired from its corner, striking Jack, who, rather than burning up, merely fell backwards, a glowing hole having appeared in his chest. Martha let out a surprised scream, and Jack managed to yell out, "RUN!" before falling limp.

Before anyone could do anything else, the woman's eyes turned to the others, and Wood and Keele panicked completely, taking off down the hall. Gwen, Martha, and Ianto, knowing that Jack would soon follow, reluctantly obeyed his command to run.

Gwen hated herself in doing so, but survival instinct overpowered her concern for Jack, certain that the woman would kill her if she remained. As she ran, Gwen didn't look to see if the cyborg or any of the cubes were in pursuit, nor did she have the time to wonder why she considered Stone, or Jack for that matter, enemies, especially since the cubes had so readily ignored them when they first appeared. But her attention was focused merely on escaping, and on hoping that Jack would soon follow.

They neared the exit, and their pace quickened. Keele and Wood left the ship first, followed quickly by Ianto, and Gwen saw Martha vanish through the door. But just before Gwen could so much as touch it, she heard a strange buzzing sound, and felt something shock her. She collapsed to the floor, unable to move a muscle, and the last thing she saw before blacking out was two of the cubes hovering above her.

* * *

><p>She was back in the room with the wolf and the scorpion. The wolf was still in its cage, whimpering from its tormenter's sting, but something seemed to rouse it again, and it stood, sniffing the air, and then it caught sight of something standing behind Rose, and began to snarl. She turned around, and saw a man standing there, someone from her distant past whom she had hoped never to see again.<p>

A new and yet old emotion erupted within Rose, another which she had only felt in this state with regards to her imprisoned situation, which was all too familiar to her when she laid eyes on this man: some fear, but mostly rage, rage at the sight of him, rage at the sudden reappearance of this liar, this predator, a cheater who had hurt her so long ago. Earlier, she had felt hope at the sight of someone she trusted. Now she suddenly felt fury. Prior to her reawakening, Rose hadn't really felt any need to control her emotions, because there had been nothing to cause a rise in emotions. Therefore she was unable to completely master her thoughts, because of the uncontrollable desire to react, to get back at him for what he did to her in early years. The wolf snarled and lunged at the bars of the cage, trying to get at him, but the scorpion turned and its sting snapped forward, striking the intruder in the heart. At that moment, reality flashed before Rose's eyes, and she saw a security droid appear, and its incinerator beam struck him. Before her eyes, Jimmy Stone screamed in agony and burned up into nothing.

Meanwhile, the wolf continued barking wildly, and the scorpion struck at it too. Rose flinched at its howls, and tried to block her ears, but this did nothing to muffle the sound of the animal's agony. Just as nothing calmed her terror, nothing dulled her pain. Every scream the wolf emitted echoed in Rose's soul, because she knew its pain and its despair.

She sat up in her bed in her mother's flat as her alarm went off. The clock, as usual, showed the time to be 7:30. Realizing that the wolf and scorpion and Jimmy Stone were all a dream, Rose hit the snooze button; but the alarm continued. Frowning, Rose pressed it again, but to no avail. Hitting it again and again, Rose's frustration increased along with the alarm's volume. She unplugged it; but even then it continued beeping. Losing patience, Rose flung it against the wall, shrieking "Stop it!" to the alarm, but nothing happened. The sound was now piercing, hurting her ears.

Rose leapt out of bed and jumped onto the offending alarm clock, breaking the digital screen, but it nonetheless continued. She picked it up and flung it against the wall again, but still, it refused to stop. She looked up, and saw a hammer on the floor nearby, which she grabbed and smashed into the clock, hitting it until it broke into pieces, but it impossibly kept going, the sound now boring into her ears like a drill.

And finally Rose broke down and knelt on the floor, clutching her ears, screaming in pain and terror.

"This isn't real!" she cried, pounding her head with her fists. "This isn't real!"

Then she woke up, and she was back in the Eternal's control room, seeing everything but she was not in control. It was no longer silent; this time she could hear the ship's alarm sounding all around her, and realized that what her mind interpreted as an alarm clock was actually the sound of the ship's defense protocols, and she realized what had happened, and which of the realities she experienced was real.

Jack and his friend stood before her as she approached, and Jack simply looked at her in morbid shock, as though she had come back from the dead. Perhaps, to him, she had. But before he could so much as call out her name, one of the droids appeared and fired an incineration beam at him, and Rose let out a terrible scream of despair, unheard by all except Eve. Jack's friends panicked and ran.

Jack was dead. His friends were abandoning the ship, and they were wise to do so. Rose had failed. Unless someone more capable of freeing her appeared, she would once again sink into oblivion, and this time she would stand no chance of escape.

But Eve wasn't done yet.

Because all who had a prior connection to Rose were considered a danger, and there was still one that Eve was particularly interested in, though Rose had not yet seen enough to understand, except that in her dreams, she kept seeing Gwyneth, the girl from Cardiff, who had died so long ago.

* * *

><p>Captain Magambo and Colonel Mace, both wearing masks, were waiting for Jack's party outside the ship, and as Martha and the others exited, she glanced back at the polyhedron to see what looked like a faint disc of electrical blue light following into the pentagonal panels, seemingly from everywhere; occasionally bolts of static electricity flashed, and Martha jumped as one struck Ianto, but though he gasped, nothing else happened. It appeared that they were not of high enough voltage to harm anyone. She could also see a faint glow crowing inside the translucent polyhedron.<p>

"What's going on?" she asked Mace after she replaced her own mask.

He answered, "Since you clearly have been inside this thing, I hoped you would tell me."

Martha opened her mouth, of half a mind to retort, but Magambo stepped in. "Three and a half minutes ago that thing started absorbing electricity," she said. "Anything electrical, cars, mobile phones, cables, they're all losing power. It's already drained the whole of Canary Wharf."

"What about the city?" asked Martha, astonished.

Magambo nodded. "You can see it from the windows," she said. "Anything electrical is out."

"We're cut off from any communication," Mace added. "Dr. Jones? What happened in there? And where are Captain Harkness and Miss Cooper?"

It was then that Martha noticed that Gwen wasn't with them. Staring at Ianto, she asked, "Didn't Gwen come out?"

Ianto shook his head, looking pale. "I don't understand, she was right behind us!"

Mace swore. "What about Captain Harkness?"

Martha hesitated. "He told us to go on ahead, he'll be out shortly." She looked back at Ianto. "When did you last see Gwen?"

"Just after that woman appeared, when Jack told us to run," he stammered. "You?"

"When we were running," Martha said tensely. "You're right, she was right behind us."

"D'you think those robots got her?" he asked.

"We would have seen that flash of light," Martha said, though this was more to reassure herself than anything else. "We should go back."

"Dr. Jones!" Colonel Mace's loud voice cut across her. "I order you to tell me, what happened in there?"

"I don't know," Martha admitted. "Even Jack couldn't identify the technology."

"Did Harkness have any guesses?" Mace pressed urgently.

Martha hesitated again. "We think it might be Gallifreyan."

As she spoke, there was a roar and the floor started shaking. Pieces of shrapnel fell from the hole in the ceiling, and everyone looked up in time to see a small whirlpool of light form above the ship, funneling down into the top of the polyhedron. As the rim of the whirlpool gently brushed against the destroyed floor above, they saw material get pulled from the building and vanish into the funnel.

"What is that?" asked Magambo.

"I don't like the look of it," Mace answered. "If I didn't know better… it looks almost like an accretion disc."

Magambo looked at him, uncomprehending, then she looked horrified. "A black hole?" she asked, stunned. "But how do we stop it?"

"Can we?" asked Ianto, looking more and more stunned and upset. "Jack hasn't come back, and if Gwen's still in there, he's probably looking for her. Not even the Daleks stood a chance against whoever built this. None of us know enough."

As he spoke, Martha felt a vibration in her pocket, and froze. Turning to Magambo, she said, "I thought you said that mobile phones weren't working."

Magambo nodded. "They're not."

Bewildered, Martha pulled her phone from her pocket. The caller ID told her that Tom was calling from South Africa, but that was beside the point. Her phone was ringing. The others, catching on, looked at it too. There was a quiet pause, except for the rushing of the accretion disc above them.

Then Martha remembered that this was the phone the Doctor had upgraded, and evidently it had managed to withstand the force of the disc. Martha let out a relieved sigh. "Jack's not out yet, but there's someone else that might know how to stop it."

With that, she promptly started dialing her old phone's number, the Doctor's number.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Sorry that took longer to get up than is my usual standard; I had to spend most of the week writing research papers, and didn't have much time to devote to this until now.**


	7. Chapter Six: Eternal Void

.

Chapter Six  
>Eternal Void<p>

It was silent when Donna Noble stirred under her blankets, and yawning widely, she sat up and rubbed her eyes. The only sound was the Tardis's usual pulsing hum, lacking the usual sound of the preoccupied Doctor that came from the console room when she woke up. Donna slid out of bed and looked at the alarm clock she had set up on her bedside table (her room had a clock on the wall, but it had five hands and showed the Gallifreyan script instead of English): by Donna's timeline, it was about five o' clock in the morning, or whatever the Tardis did besides mornings.

The first new noise Donna heard was the Doctor's footsteps down the hall, and deciding that despite the early hour it was time for her to get up too, she crossed the room to the dresser and started sorting through her clothes.

It was odd, she thought as she pulled on a blue shirt, that every day on the Tardis started like any normal day on Earth: get up, get dressed, and have your breakfast. After that, however, the day grew progressively more and more bizarre, from the moment the Doctor would bound from the kitchen to the control room, and then spend half an hour deciding where to go before setting the coordinates.

After she finished getting dressed, she thought she heard voices in the control room, and she curiously opened her door and quietly walked down the corridor. When she reached the console room, however, she only saw the Doctor standing by the Time Rotor, looking nonplussed, but Donna could have sworn she heard a second voice say, just before she entered, "Prepare yourself, Doctor. It begins now."

The Doctor hadn't noticed her, but before Donna could make herself known, she heard a ring tone. The Doctor turned around and picked up Martha's mobile phone.

"That you, Martha?"

There was a pause, then the Doctor asked, "Why? What's the matter?"

The next pause as Martha spoke was a bit longer. The odd feeling Donna had about the day ahead grew stronger; Martha never called unless something was happening and she needed help, but Donna also felt thrilled at the opportunity to visit their friend.

The Doctor nodded as Martha spoke, and then suddenly rolled his eyes. "What the hell have you and Harkness done now?" he demanded, surprising Donna. Evidently Martha was less surprised, because Donna heard her loud, exasperated retort from across the room. The Doctor winced and moved the phone away from his ear for a second, and then asked, "What, it's not even been an hour since he showed up, and he's already died?" Donna stared at the Doctor, startled at his unfeeling tone, but then he sighed, and said, "All right, I'll follow your signal. If you can, make sure Jack doesn't do anything stupid when he wakes up, before I get there. You don't know where he is? Don't worry, he'll turn up. He has a habit of doing that. Be there in a moment."

He snapped the phone shut, and Donna cleared her throat. The Doctor jumped and looked up to see her.

"Wow, you're on edge this morning," Donna remarked, though burning with curiosity.

The Doctor recovered his composure, looking slightly embarrassed. "Sorry, Donna. I'm not usually that jumpy."

"Bad night?"

He shrugged. "Bad night, and very unusual morning. Not a good combination."

Donna looked at the phone that he was now hooking up to the console. "What was that about?"

"Something happening on Earth, apparently." The Doctor ran his fingers through his hair. "_Again_. Martha's phoned for help."

"Oh, that was Martha? I hadn't guessed?" Donna deadpanned. "But it'll be good to see her." As she watched the Doctor tapping away at a keyboard, his eyes fixed on the console screen, she asked, "Er… who's Harkness?"

The Time Lord paused, and then groaned, "I'm going to have to introduce you to the immortal Casanova." At Donna's raised eyebrow, he finally relented, "Jack Harkness, he's a friend of mine. He used to travel with me, before I met Martha."

"But I heard you, it sounded like you were saying he was dead?" Donna asked, now thoroughly confused.

"An everyday thing for him," the Doctor told her. "There was an accident involving the Time Vortex, and it made Jack slightly immortal. Well, _completely _immortal; he dies, he just comes back to life."

It took Donna a moment to process this. Then she demanded, "Is _anything _normal with you lot? Don't answer that!" she added when she saw the Doctor's incredulous expression.

He fiddled with some controls, and then pulled a switch. "Ah ha!" he cried. "Locked onto Martha's location." The Doctor then looked sideways at Donna as the rotor started moving up and down, and the engines started whining. "I should warn you, Jack's a bit… well, let's just say he considers the day wasted if he hasn't snogged or flirted with six people before lunchtime."

Donna, now over the strange truth of Jack's immortality, simply told him, "Just leave him to me. I'll set him right."

The Doctor hid his face in his hands. "That's exactly what I'm afraid of."

"Oi!"

* * *

><p>No sooner had Martha hung up when the familiar while of the Tardis engines reached her ears, and she looked to her right just in time to see the familiar blue police box come into view in a corner opposite the polyhedron, which was growing still brighter. The gyrating light above them had also grown brighter, and they could feel a gentle rush of air spiraling around them, carrying dust with it, like a dust devil.<p>

The Tardis doors opened and the Doctor sprinted out, pulling on his brown trench coat; Donna followed close behind. As Martha ran to greet them, the Doctor looked from the strange vessel and the accretion of electrical energy to the flaring light above them. His eyes widened, and his mouth opened and closed a few times, but no sound came out. For once, the Doctor looked speechless.

"I think you've got the gist of what's going on," Martha said sarcastically.

The Doctor stared at her. "What the hell happened here?"

"We're still not completely sure what happened," Martha told him. "We don't even know where this thing came from. It just showed up here and blew half the place apart."

"And where is here?" asked Donna.

Martha glanced at Ianto uneasily, and then looked back at the Doctor. "Welcome back to Torchwood Tower. Or what's left of it."

The Doctor blanched, and a shadow passed over his face. He then shook his head, and turned back to the vessel, pulling his sonic screwdriver from a pocket. "It's draining everything electrical and harnessing that power."

He pointed the screwdriver at the light and started staring at it.

"I notice that thing's still working," Colonel Mace remarked. "It and my phone. Everything else has no power."

The Doctor lowered the screwdriver. "It's using the power to set an energy pattern unraveling the threads of time and space around it, starting up there." He pointed at the funnel of light above them. "If I didn't know better… it's building an event horizon. It's not powerful enough to be threatening to us… not yet, anyway, but that won't last long."

"So it is forming a black hole," Magambo groaned.

"A black hole?" gasped Donna. "But don't they, like suck everybody in or something?"

"It's not just forming a black hole," the Doctor said, amazed. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that the icosahedron _is _the black hole. Or at least, it will be. A fully formed artificial singularity. And yes, Donna, once its density has increased enough, and the breach it's forming opens, it will start pulling everything and everyone inside it, planet included. We're in too close proximity to it."

"How long have we got?" asked Donna.

"I don't know. A couple of hours, perhaps." He turned back to Martha. "And that thing just appeared here? At Torchwood Tower, of all places?"

Martha nodded. "It blew half the place apart."

The Doctor's eyes shut as fury and horror crossed his face again. He swayed a little, as though he was about to pass out, and Martha and Donna both moved to catch him, but he didn't fall. Instead he rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, and recovering, he bound up to the polyhedron. "Right. We need to get inside it and find a way to shut it down."

"We already got inside it," Martha reminded him.

The Doctor looked at her. "You did? How? This technology is way beyond Earth. _I'd _have a hard time getting inside it." He then paused. "Oh, right. You did say that Jack's still in it, didn't you? And one of his teammates never came out, right?"

Martha had to repress her exasperation at his forgetting that bit, reminding herself that he himself was distressed just for being here, for the same reason Jack and Ianto had been. "No. Gwen's still in there too. But do you know what it is? Apart from a potential singularity?"

"Oh yeah." The Doctor scratched the back of his neck. "I know exactly what it is. So how did you get in?"

"Jack discovered it," Martha told him. "Those two hexagonal panels there, they form a doorway. You can just walk right through it… although now, I'm not sure if it's still open."

The Doctor scanned the panels with his screwdriver, and looked at the results. "Oh, of course. Liquid energy. But it's not fluctuating, so it seems safe enough." He cautiously placed his hand on it, and just as Jack's had before, it sunk out of sight. Looking at the others, he said, "Right, then, Martha, Donna, let's see what's going on." He looked at Ianto and the rest of the group. "Anyone else coming?"

Ianto stepped forward. "Gwen and Jack are in there. I saw what happened. I can help."

The Doctor looked at him. "What was your name?"

"Ianto Jones." He looked at the Time Lord. "Are you the same Doctor from Torchwood's history?"

The Doctor looked slightly surprised, but he forced a grin. "Yep, that's me. Werewolf, Queen Victoria, and all." He then turned back to the ship, and then walked in, beckoning for the others to follow him. Donna followed, and gasped as she took in the room beyond it.

"It's like the Tardis!"

Martha, stepping through too, said, "Partly why we need you, Doctor."

"You would not believe how much this is a relief to me," the Doctor sighed, as he looked around. "This ship is dimensionally transcendental, and that means it can't be the same as last time."

As Ianto stepped in as well, Donna asked, "What d'you mean, the same as last time?"

The Doctor looked at her. "I've seen one of these before, but this is much more sophisticated." He looked at Martha and Ianto, and continued, "It's a vessel designed to travel between different realities. We're in another Void Ship."

* * *

><p>Gwen slowly opened her eyes, and soon shielded them again against a bright white light. As her eyes adjusted, she realized she was in a round room, and the walls were lined with more control panels, but they were white, not blue. She tried to move, but then realized that her wrists and ankles were cuffed to the wall. Then she saw a pair of feet before her, and looking up, she found herself face to face with the cybernetic woman who had killed Stone and Jack.<p>

"How are you alive?" she demanded, as soon as Gwen looked at her.

Surprised, Gwen could only reply, "I suppose because you didn't kill me."

The woman ignored this. "_How are you alive_?" she repeated, her voice louder, though still monotonous.

Gwen swallowed. "Shouldn't I be?"

The cyborg stepped away from her. Changing tact, she then commanded, "Identify yourself." When Gwen made no answer, she repeated, "Identify yourself!"

"Gwen," she slowly said. "Gwen Cooper."

The cyborg paused, seemingly thinking, and then told her, "According to the database, the human Gwyneth was terminated in a natural gas explosion in the Earth year CE 1869. You should not be alive."

Gwen, more confused than ever, could think of no reply to this. Instead, she asked, "Why are you doing this?"

The cyborg did not answer. Seemingly losing interest, she placed her mechanical hand on one of the panels on the wall, and went still for a moment. Then she said, "Jack Harkness was terminated six minutes and forty-three seconds ago. But two minutes and twenty-two seconds ago, we detected him lying sixteen meters from where we terminated him. You know why."

Gwen swallowed.

"It is recorded in the database that Captain Jack Harkness, a former Time Agent and con artist, was killed by Daleks in the Earth year CE 200,100. He should not be alive. Now he has survived another fatal termination beam." She looked back at Gwen. "Explain!"

Gwen shook her head. "I don't know."

The cyborg looked at her, then looked back at the controls. "The Time Agent will try to terminate me, and take her from the _Eternal_. You will ensure that he doesn't."

"Take who?" asked Gwen.

The cyborg glared at her. "He will not touch her. He will obey, or you will be terminated."

"Why are you doing this?" Gwen asked again, now feeling very frightened. "What do you want?"

The cyborg simply looked at her, and then her head jerked to the side abruptly, looking away, as though listening. Then she said menacingly, "_He is here._"

* * *

><p>It was <em>him<em>.

Rose had very nearly given into her despair, when to her confusion, Eve seized the girl who looked like Gwyneth and took her into the core of the ship, speaking as though Jack had somehow survived. When that happened, Rose began concentrating on Eve's reality again, searching for Jack, when they simultaneously felt it. Jack's doctor friend had returned, and she had brought another Doctor, the one person Rose believed could free her.

She had felt Eve become alert as it detected four humanoids enter the ship, two of which had been there before; but there as an incongruity in their biological signatures. Rose's interest had perked up at this, and then she saw a tall, thin man with brown hair and side burns, and dark eyes that were so familiar to her, the same eyes that even now had never failed to fill her with comfort and trust.

He was now speaking to the other doctor as he walked. As Rose's curiosity rose, Eve began to listen to their conversation. It was at that moment that the Doctor saw the remains of one of the Dalek invaders, and paused to examine it.

"Blimey," he said quietly. "You weren't kidding, were you?"

The human doctor peered inside the Dalek's shell. "You still haven't seen anything, Doctor. We've already been in the control room, and Jack says it's clearly not a Dalek ship."

"He was right," the Doctor replied, "although that should have been clear from the moment you stepped in this ship. The Daleks lacked the imagination to make things bigger on the inside. Anyway, this one is a completely different design from the Dalek Void Ship."

"Sorry, what are Daleks?" the ginger-haired woman asked. Rose looked at her more closely and was shocked to see the same woman she had seen who had hidden her mother's keys in a dustbin.

"Think of the Nazis," the human doctor told her, "and imagine their numbers, their technology, their master race ideology, and their genocide multiplied by a billion… and you get the Daleks."

The redhead looked sick, but before she could say anything, the Doctor drew their attention back to the problem at hand, then both turned to the other man who had returned with them. Rose tuned out; however much she loved to hear the Doctor's voice, she had more important things to do, because Eve was still in defense mode. Anyone formerly acquainted with her was in deadly danger here, and only Rose could protect them.

* * *

><p>"What was <em>he<em> doing here?" the Doctor demanded, looking outraged.

"Jack already asked that," Martha told him, exasperated. "It doesn't matter why he was here. He's dead. You won't have to put up with him."

This surprised the Doctor. "He's dead? How did that happen?"

Martha looked at Ianto, who answered, "We were in the control room… Stone, Gwen and I, that is, and we saw somebody there, a woman, some sort of… a cyborg, I guess. She said something funny when she saw Gwen, something about her presence being illogical. She ignored me completely, but the second she saw Stone, she declared him an enemy and said something about defense systems. Then one of the cubes appeared and incinerated him."

The Doctor looked at Martha. "And you didn't see this?"

Martha shook her head. "The control room's huge, and it's a donut shape. We couldn't see them."

The Doctor looked ahead, his expression contemplative. "But that would explain what set off the process of creating a singularity. The defense protocols activated, and this vessel is designed to exist outside of time and space. As part of the protocols, it began the process of moving into singularity mode so it could open a breach in space-time, using whatever power it could get. But why would Jimmy Stone set it off?"

"The cyborg declared him an enemy," Ianto reminded him.

The Doctor's frown deepened. "Yes, but what connection would somebody like him have with a Void Ship? Was he ever at Canary Wharf under Torchwood?"

Martha and Ianto shook their heads. "Not that I know if," the former answered, "but at some point UNIT recruited him, and they have been in control of Canary Wharf ever since the battle."

The Doctor sighed. "The first Void Ship was gone by then. Let's think. Void Ship, Void ship, void… oh."

His face lit up for a second, but his conclusive expression faded the moment it appeared. Turning to Ianto, he demanded, "The cyborg, what did she look like?"

"She looked human, except for all the bionic stuff," he answered. "She looked ill, and emotionless, just like…" But he fell silent. His expression was distant. "Thing that's odd is that she looked familiar to me."

Martha, remembering suddenly, remarked, "I've seen her before too."

The Doctor looked at Martha, surprised. "When did you see her?"

"She came around the corner when we met up with Martha and Jack," Ianto told him. "Jack looked really surprised by her, but she shot him before he could do anything."

"And only this morning she was on the TV screens," Martha added. "It was just for a split second. I thought I'd imagined it, but I guess not."

A tense look had formed on the Doctor's face. His eyes were shining, but his jaw was very set.

"Doctor?" asked Donna tentatively. "Are you all right?"

"It can't be," he whispered incredulously, as though he hadn't heard her. "It just can't be… it's completely impossible."

* * *

><p>"So is it Time Lord?" asked Martha.<p>

They were now in the control room. The Doctor had bounded to the controls the moment they entered, and ran his hands and a sonic screwdriver over them, making awe-struck exclamations as he did, and causing his companions to smile at each other in amusement; even in a crisis, the Doctor couldn't resist examining technology. However, they also recognized that they had less than two hours before the black hole opened completely, so Martha brought the Doctor's attention back to the problem at hand.

He shook his head in response to her question. "Wrong architecture, wrong scientific discipline," he answered. "To the Time Lords, Void travel was just a theory."

"But it's bigger on the inside!" Donna protested. "That's Time Lord, isn't it?"

The Doctor smirked. "I said the Time Lords were the _first_ to make things dimensionally transcendental. I never said they were the _only_ ones." He looked back at the controls. "To my knowledge, there are only a few civilizations in this sector of the universe that had the necessary technology to build a Void Ship. Void travel, that would be related to travel between parallel universes, so whoever invented this was more than capable of crossing realities."

"It has a defense system that is capable of fighting Daleks," Martha added.

The Doctor nodded. "So it does. Good point. What else? Liquid energy portals, the formation of which is based on the angle between the vessel and a gravitational center… as for basic architecture and design… clearly the hexagon was an important shape to this culture."

Then he paused, and an odd look crossed his face, one of sudden realization, shock, and then finally disquiet. The Doctor drew his hand from the control panel hastily and stepped back, as though it had burned him.

"What's the matter?" asked Donna.

"Taledrev," he breathed.

"Come again?"

"There's only one civilization that matches this technology." The Doctor looked back at them. "The Imperium of Taledrev." Seeing their blank expressions, he clarified, "Put it his way: if the Daleks are like the Third Reich times a million, then the Taledrevans are the British Empire times a million. Taledrev was the name of their star, which is located in the elliptical galaxy Earth astronomers call MGC 13-7-2. They had a 'divide and conquer' type of imperialism, which led them to conquer billions of worlds across many galaxies. They were certainly as powerful as the Daleks, probably more powerful, and they even rivaled the Time Lords in power… and they were about as ancient. My people called them the Taledrevans," he reflected, "but I think more commonly they're known as the Helials."

As he said these words, the ship's pulse seemed to slow for a second, almost as though the very mention of its creators alerted it.

"On the other hand, they never tried to take over this galaxy, or any of the other nearby galaxies," he added. "The Time Lords' presence here discouraged them. They were imperialist, but they knew where they could not win. The Time Lords and the Helials generally avoided each other."

"How come you're talking about them in the past tense?" asked Martha. "What happened to them?"

"They vanished," he answered simply. "Way back at the start of the Time War, knowing that the Helials hated the Daleks as much as anyone, the Time Lords tried to ask them for assistance. But by the time the messengers got to Taledrev, they'd gone. Nobody was sure what happened to them, but now…" He looked around. "Now I think I know where they went."

"So that cyborg we saw earlier, was that a Helial?" asked Martha.

"I don't think so." The Doctor's face was grim. Martha started to speak, but the Doctor continued, "This ship is almost empty except for us, the cyborg, dead Daleks, and these cubes you told me about. I would guess that it had been abandoned. The possibility of the Helials' continuing existence is alarming, but if I'm right, what we should be worried about is what is now controlling the ship." He paused. "If I'm right. I just hope it isn't what I think it is." The others looked at him curiously, but the Doctor didn't elaborate. He looked around. "Right!" he said loudly, making them jump. "Let's get to business. We need to find the cyborg, but we also need to find Jack and this Gwen you've lost. I suggest we split into groups. Donna and I will go look for the cyborg, Martha, you and Ianto go look for Jack. He may have already worked out what's going on, and is trying to stop it himself. Help him out when you find him, and keep an eye out for this cyborg too. She could have gone anywhere by now."

Martha looked like she wanted to argue, but then thought better of it, seemingly relieved that the Doctor at least hadn't demanded that she leave. So she and Ianto moved in the opposite direction, and Donna and the Doctor set off in the direction where Ianto had indicated he'd seen the cyborg. As they walked past another set of controls, Donna saw the Doctor twitch. "Stop fidgeting, Spaceman!" she scolded. "You'll have plenty of time to look around once we've shut this thing off!"

The Doctor scowled at her. "Magnificent as this place is, and as much as I'd love to look at the tech, that's not what I'm fidgeting about."

"Then what?" asked Donna. "You're troubled about something. What is it?"

The Doctor didn't answer immediately. A wistful look had appeared in his eyes, and though his face was very serious, Donna thought she saw a small, slightly hopeful smile.

"If I'm right," he said quietly, "you'll see what this is about. If I'm not right, it won't matter." Seeing his companion's confused frown, he added, "Your father died a few months after I met you, right?"

Donna nodded, wondering where this was going.

"Imagine that you just found out he may actually be alive."

Donna stared at him in bewilderment and trepidation. "Doctor, what's going on?" she demanded.

The Doctor merely shook his head, his expression still wistful, and she knew that it was no good trying to get him to open up further. They moved along, stepping past the destroyed Daleks as they did, and then the Doctor paused before a small group of Daleks, his eyes on the floor, which was covered with the white Dalek dust. He pointed at a pattern in the dust.

"You see that?" he asked. "Someone fell in that, probably Ianto or Gwen. Martha said the place shook when the defense systems activated. I think we're near where he saw the cyborg."

"Doctor, is that a gun?" Donna asked, pointing at a rifle that lay beside a pile of the dust. The Doctor looked at it, and then at the dust, and winced. "Yeah. I think that must have been our old friend Mr. Stone."

He then looked up past the controls and at the wall. Finding a gap between the control panels, he placed his hand on the wall, its surface rippling slightly beneath his fingers. Then he pressed his ear against it.

"I think this is the core of the ship," he said, listening closely. "If I could access the main computer… Let's see, there must be a way inside."

The Doctor stepped back, scrutinizing the wall for a moment, before looking at Donna. "Let's move on. The Helials obsessively used hexagons in their architecture, so if you see any sort of hexagonal panel in the wall, let me know," he instructed. "And be quick about it. We have got to find her."

"A hexagonal panel… you mean like that one?" asked Donna, pointing. The Doctor looked in the indicated direction, and just as he had predicted, there was a hexagonal surface on the wall between two panels. As they approached, the surface rippled and opened, revealing a tunnel.

"That's weird," Donna remarked. "If the computer's in there, surely it would be under maximum security?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Somebody in there likes you, I suppose. Or me."

* * *

><p>"So where did you see her before?" asked Martha, as she and Ianto cautiously moved down the bend of the control room. "You did say she looked familiar."<p>

"I'm not sure, off the top of my head," Ianto said after a minute. "My question is how you saw her on the TV today."

Martha shook her head. "All these odd connections… Jimmy Stone, the Void, the Void Ship, Canary Wharf…"

"I don't quite see the connections, or where Stone comes into it," Ianto remarked.

"I think I do," Martha said. "At least, I think I know who he and Jack were arguing about, though I never met her."

"Who?" asked Ianto.

"Rose Tyler," Martha replied. "An old friend of the Doctor's and Jack's, but she didn't survive the Battle of Canary Wharf."

"Oh." Ianto looked contemplative. He then opened his mouth to say more, but then suddenly he seized Martha and dragged her behind a pile of ruined Dalek shells. "Down!"

They ducked behind the dead Daleks, just as one of the cubes drifted by. Martha and Ianto remained as still and as quiet as they possibly could, not daring to even breathe, but to their utmost relief, the cube moved past them. It appeared to have not noticed them. Still, they remained in their position until the cube drifted around the bend of the room and out of sight.

Martha and Ianto straightened, and made to continue down the opposite direction, but at that moment, the heard a small thud, and paused. A moment later, it echoed again, and then one of the hexagonal tiles on the floor shifted and moved up. Then a dark-haired head popped up from under the floor.

"Jack?" Martha almost exclaimed, though quieting herself hastily.

Jack blinked at her. "Martha? Ianto?" His face hardened. "What are you two doing in here? I told you to get out!"

"We came back, Gwen never came out with us," Ianto informed him.

"I know, I saw the cubes drag her into there." Jack pointed at a hexagonal panel in the wall between the controls. "The had some sort of beam that enabled them to lift her."

"Was she all right, though?" asked Martha.

Jack, as he pulled him self out from within the floor, nodded. "I think she was, though she looked unconscious."

Martha looked at the tile that Jack pushed back in place. "What were you doing in there, anyway?"

"The door to whatever's in there sealed behind the cubes," Jack told her. "I was trying to find another way in."

"What do they want with Gwen?" asked Ianto. "She has no connection with this."

"They took her hostage, because they know I'm here." Jack looked back at the wall, frustrated. "What else have you found out?"

"Jack, we brought the Doctor here," Martha informed him.

Jack looked pleased with that news initially, then his face fell. "What for?" he asked, looking worried.

Martha and Ianto explained about the forming singularity, and everything else the Doctor had explained about the Void Ship and the Helials.

"Well, I suppose out of all of us he is the most likely to know how to stop this thing," Jack said, once they finished, but he still looked upset. "But he's also probably more in danger than any of us."

"Why?" asked Martha.

"Because once he sees her, there is nothing in any reality which will stop him, and she knows it," Jack told them.

"You mean the cyborg?" asked Ianto. "She'll try to kill him?"

"It's why it tried to kill me." A steely look flashed from Jack's eyes.

Martha stared at him. "You know her, don't you?"

Jack nodded. "Oh yes. I'd recognize her anywhere. But until now, I thought she was dead." He then assumed an expression of determined fury, one that made Ianto step backwards. "But it's not her. Not really. It killed Stone because he hurt her in the past. It killed me because it knew I'd try to take her back. It will try to kill the Doctor too. I think whatever's controlling her will try to kill anyone with a past connection with her. Anyone who knew her, especially anyone who loved her, is a threat."

Martha's eyes widened. "You don't mean…?" she gasped.

Before Jack could answer, the hexagonal panel rippled, and they all looked at it. A moment later, the surface vanished, revealing an opening.

* * *

><p>The passage to the core was much narrower than the first corridor they had come through, barely large enough for one man to walk through. It was much more dimly lit, and when they entered, the background resonance that was audible throughout the ship was a bit louder, seemingly confirming the Doctor's theory that this part of the ship contained its most important mechanisms.<p>

They could see brighter light at the end of the passage some twenty feet away. The Doctor warned Donna to keep as quiet as she could, and then they slowly moved down the passage. As they neared the brightly lit room Donna supposed was at the center of the ship, the Doctor stopped and took a deep breath, as though he were bracing himself for something. Then he peered into the room. Donna saw the Doctor's face drain of all color, and his eyes began to water. He then stepped into the room, his eyes fixed on a point to his left. Donna entered, and gasped.

They were standing in a large, domed room, with white circuit boards lining the round walls, and there was a console in the center covered with similar controls to the ones in the control room outside. The Doctor, however, was looking at a blonde woman standing by the wall, who was watching them closely with a calculating expression, as though she were expecting them. She clearly was the cyborg Ianto had described, judging by the mechanical implants on her face and scalp, and her artificial hand. Beside her, cuffed to the wall, stood a young brunette woman Donna supposed was Gwen.

The Doctor looked at Gwen for a second, who was watching him with a bewildered look, then back at the cyborg, and he slowly began to approach her, until he stood right in front of her, his eyes fixed on hers. The Doctor's right hand twitched, as though he were resisting the urge to touch the woman's face.

"Rose," he whispered. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Donna gaped at him. "Rose? As in Rose Tyler? _Your_ Rose?"

The Doctor shook his head, and stepped back from her. "No," he said. "It's something else. Something has taken over her mind."

"But she was dead!" Donna turned back to look at Rose. "You said so yourself!"

"Obviously she survived." The Doctor's voice shook. He then looked at the other woman. "It's Gwen, isn't it? Are you all right?"

Gwen nodded. "She hasn't hurt me. But she knew you were coming, and that Jack's still alive."

The Doctor nodded, and looked back at Rose, pausing to retain his composure. Then his horrified expression was replaced with one of fury.

"Who are you?" he demanded of the cyborg. "Identify yourself!"

Rose stepped back, and answered, "I am designated Eve of the Vanguard Existential Ship _Eternal_, Registry Alpha 3-3-5 Delta 8-1D, Navigation and Defense."

Her voice, monotonous, gravelly, and metallic, made Donna shiver.

"I was right," the Doctor said, his voice dangerously calm. He paced around Eve, and she turned around to continue looking at him. "It's the mainframe of this ship, the main computer, an artificial intelligence spliced onto Rose's body and using her brain as a memory base."

"The knowledge and memories of the human, Rose Tyler, belong to me now," Eve confirmed. "Through her, I can access information about you, Doctor of the Tardis, Last of the Time Lords." She then turned to Donna. "You are unknown to me," she said simply, before turning to look at Gwen. "Your presence is impossible. I repeat, the human Gwyneth was terminated."

Gwen merely looked weary at these words, leading Donna to suspect that Eve had been hounding her about that since she arrived. However, the Doctor, who was now slowly moving to the side, was unfazed. "And what do you want with her? She's nothing to you, no threat."

"She is an anomaly," Eve insisted. "She is also an advantage. If you or Harkness come any closer, if you try to disconnect Rose Tyler, or release the anomaly, it will only take one thought, one command, for ten thousand volts to run through her bands. She will die in an instant."

Donna swallowed. The Doctor, upon Eve's warning, stopped edging towards Gwen. "Tell me, how did Rose come to be inside this Void Ship?" he demanded. "You can talk to me, Eve of the _Eternal._ Surely her memories tell you that much?"

Eve's gaze snapped back to the Doctor. "The Helials were to remain stationary in Nonexistence until the end of the Gallifreyan Time War, but the _Eternal _was damaged by a second transcendentally existential vessel, one not of Taledrevan making," she told him. "The collision cracked Nonexistence, and the foreign vessel fell through the breach."

"What's do you mean by 'Nonexistence?'" Gwen asked the Doctor.

"Nonexistence, Oblivion, the Void," the Doctor told her quietly. "Short answer, the expanse of nothingness between universes." He turned his attention back to Eve, smiling for the first time since he had entered the room. "So that's where the Daleks' Void Ship came from."

Eve ignored this statement, so the Doctor presumed that he was right. She continued, "This vessel was damaged in the collision, causing it to remain stationary and dysfunctional. As part of the ship's protocols, I initiated self-repair. As the program began, however, the fissure inexplicably reversed into a spatial breach, through which flowed millions of Daleks and unclassified cybernetic humanoids, which the human's memories tell me are called Cybermen." She looked at Gwen for a moment, before turning back to the Doctor. "The Helials were greatly alarmed by this, because they feared the Daleks, but after the last of the Daleks appeared came through, they were followed by a solitary human female. The Helials correctly deduced that she bore possible responsibility for the occurrence, and they needed information concerning the Daleks and the Time War."

"So they saved her," the Doctor breathed.

Eve bowed her head in a small, acknowledging nod. "She was dying," she said noncommittally. "There is no oxygen in Nonexistence, and her respiratory system had collapsed by the time the Helials took her into the ship. She was placed on immediate life support. Even then, however, she couldn't be revived."

"Why not?" asked Gwen. "If you could cure her…"

Eve looked at Gwen. "She had been exposed to nihility."

Irritated at the cyborg's ambiguous answer, Donna snapped, "What does that mean?"

"She had been exposed to nihility," Eve repeated.

Shaking her head, Donna turned to the Doctor for an answer. His anger had vanished; what was left was an expression of exhaustion and sadness, but he clarified, "The concept of true nonexistence, of true nothingness is beyond the comprehension of most species." He glanced at Eve, before continuing, "Imagine it, Donna. No light, no dark, no heat, no cold, no sound or silence, no touch, no up nor down, not even time."

Donna looked off into space, thinking hard on the Doctor's words, but after a moment, she shook her head again, and the Doctor nodded.

"You can't imagine it, can you?" he asked. "It's beyond human comprehension, but Rose saw and felt the Void. She saw true nihility." He paused, before adding in a hushed voice, "She must have gone insane."

Hearing this, Eve replied, "Negative. There were no neural connections left for insanity. Every neuron in her central nervous system ceased to function, an effect of abstract nihilism flooding the mind through the senses. Every nervous function, voluntary and involuntary, had stopped. These functions had to be done artificially, so the human was wired cybernetically into the _Eternal_'s medical systems."

She turned her face to the right for a moment, so that the implants would become more visible.

The Doctor nodded and put his hands in his pocket. "Cybernetic life support; the implants perform the functions for her."

As he spoke, he saw movement behind Eve, and glanced over her shoulder just long enough to see Jack, Martha, and Ianto enter the room quietly through another doorway. The Doctor quickly looked back at Eve, fervently hoping that she had noticed nothing. Fortunately, her attention had returned to Gwen, who suddenly spoke up.

"All right, you got her breathing again," she said quickly, and the Doctor realized that she, perhaps having seen the others enter too, was carefully keeping the cyborg's attention on her. "Then what?"

Eve blinked, but replied, "The Helials proceeded to repair her neurons. It took many months."

"But if she's been fixed by now, why is she still wired to you?" asked Gwen.

"The Daleks in Nonexistence attacked," Eve replied calmly. "They last longer in nihility than humans, but desperate to escape it, they attacked this vessel."

"I surmised as much," the Doctor remarked. "How much damage was there?"

"Eighty-six percent systems failure," Eve replied. "The primary memory base was destroyed. Only the self-defense and self-repair protocols, which are independent function of the mainframe, remained operational. The Helials immediately abandoned the _Eternal_, and in their haste to escape the Daleks they left Rose Tyler, who was still wired into the medical console. She survived, however, because the self-defense, though heavily damaged, succeeded in annihilating the invaders."

The Doctor looked enraged again.

"Then once the Daleks are destroyed, the self-repair comes on again," he snarled. "You needed something to process your backup data, so you grabbed the nearest thing to a central processor you had: the brain of a human being who conveniently was already wired into your systems!"

Eve said nothing as Donna gasped again at these words. Behind the cyborg, the Doctor noticed Jack pull a small, cylindrical object from one of his pockets, and again, he looked back to keep Eve's attention on them. Donna, however, beat him to it.

"What about Rose?" she hissed indignantly.

The Doctor shook his head. "Rose herself, her consciousness, has been shoved into a corner of her brain, most likely the subconscious, which, being abstract itself, would have initially survived exposure to the Void. To a logical entity like Eve, it serves no useful purpose, however, except to subdue the host. Can't have her fighting you, interfering with operations, can you?" He was now visibly shaking with anger. "Bloody, self-repairing ships! Well, thank you, Eve of the _Eternal_! That was all I needed to know." He looked past her. "Jack!"

Eve swung around, just as Jack lunged at her, shoving her against the wall. At the same time, the Doctor whipped his sonic screwdriver from his pocket and pointed it at Gwen. Sparks flew from a small panel in the wall beside her, and though her bands didn't open, she was unharmed. While the Doctor immediately set to work freeing Gwen, Eve swung her arm upwards to strike at Jack viciously, but he pulled it down and plunged the syringe into her shoulder. Just as rapidly, Eve reached up and grabbed Jack's throat with her metal hand. He gagged as Martha and Ianto ran to help, but this was unnecessary. Eve slowed, let go of Jack's throat, and fell back against the wall, her eyes falling shut. Jack caught her as she slid down the wall, completely unconscious.

At that moment, the Doctor managed to undo the last of Gwen's bands, releasing her, but after that he immediately ran Rose and Jack, the latter holding her up.

"Well, that went smoothly," Jack remarked, although his tired expression belied the cheer with which he spoke. His face held none of the horror which the Doctor had felt when he had entered the room, but Jack was always better at masking his emotions.

"You were brilliant," the Doctor told him. He then looked up at Gwen. "And you were brilliant. You were consciously distracting Eve, weren't you?"

Gwen was massaging her wrists. "Why was she so interested in me?" she asked.

"Because Rose's memories told Eve that you're Gwyneth from 1869 Cardiff. You look extraordinarily like her. Gwyneth, however, has been dead for a long time, and your presence here confused Eve." He paused. "I think Eve eventually understood that you only resemble her, but you also were a useful hostage."

Gwen nodded in understanding, but before anyone could say anything else, the ship's pulse slowed to its original pace and its original pitch.

"That must be the system shutting down!" Jack said, relieved.

"So it's stopped turning into a black hole?" asked Donna hopefully.

The Doctor nodded.

"Can Eve still control her?" asked Martha, speaking for the first time. She was staring at Rose.

Jack shook his head. "I don't think so. I think it needs Rose's brain completely alert, otherwise it would still be forming the black hole. Since she's unconscious now…"

"But Eve isn't unconscious," the Doctor pointed out, as he gathered Rose into his arms and stood with a grunt. "We've got to get Rose out of here and disconnect her before Eve compensates. We also don't want the defense systems kicking in again. Talking of unconsciousness," he said to Jack suddenly, "where did that anesthetic come from?"

Jack shrugged. "You never know when they come in handy."

The Doctor snorted. "Knowing you, very frequently."

At that moment, the opposite wall rippled, and the Doctor looked to the side in time to see one of the security cubes appear, and turned a corner so that its incinerator beam was aimed directly at them. The Doctor, still clutching it in his right hand, struggled to point his sonic screwdriver at the automaton. When he activated it, sparks flew from the cube's sides and it fell to the floor, dead.

"Jack," he said sharply, as he heaved Rose over his shoulders, "take the others and go. Get them to the Tardis."

"What about you?" asked Martha.

He shot her a look. "Leave the rest to me. I'll meet you at the Tardis. Go!"

The wall rippled again, and another cube appeared. The Doctor, with his free hand, again turned on the screwdriver, but this time nothing happened. The cube paused and quivered for a moment, but apart from that, nothing happened.

"Oh shit," Jack groaned. "They have instantaneous adaptation."

"Run!" the Doctor yelled.

* * *

><p><strong>AN:**

**More to come soon. I've only told half of what's happened to Rose. In the next chapter, the other shoe will drop. **


	8. Chapter Seven: Taledrevan Perpetualism

.

Chapter Seven  
>Taledrevan Perpetualism<p>

The others legged it down the passage Jack had come down, but the cube did not follow them; it faced the Doctor, who straightened as much as Rose's weight would allow him, and slowly backed toward his original passage. The cube pointed its corner at the Doctor, but did not fire, slowly moving toward him. The Doctor glanced backwards quickly to make certain he was moving in the right direction, and certain of his bearings, he sidestepped into the passage. The cube followed him.

"Relinquish the central processor," a gravelly voice growled from the cube.

"Oh, now you're speaking to me?" the Doctor retorted sarcastically. He shifted Rose on his shoulders and turned, so that the cube could see more of her. "We're at an impasse, naturally."

"Relinquish the central processor," it repeated.

"Obviously she's keeping me alive, so that's unlikely, isn't it?" he snapped. Of all the unlikely things to happen, he never imagined for a moment that he'd end up holding _Rose Tyler_ hostage for his own safety; but the cubes would never fire upon him and risk harming Eve, and that was the Doctor's advantage.

After a moment, the Doctor finally stepped back out into the control room, next to the pile of dead Daleks and what was left of Jimmy Stone. Glancing down to make sure he didn't trip over the Daleks, he then saw Stone's rifle, still on the ground and coated with ashes, an object he despised normally, but for the moment could be his salvation. Again he shifted Rose's position, though it just about killed his shoulder, so that he would have a free hand; then he stooped down and picked it up.

"You fire that incinerator, you destroy Eve," the Doctor laughed. "I would die, but you would also destroy the very thing you were designed to protect. If you don't shoot, however, I take her. Which will it be?"

The cube didn't reply, but nor did it stop following him. Then the Doctor heard a light hum behind him, and knew that another cube was approaching. He paused, and let the cube approach, until he could hear it only feet away.

"I swore I'd never use one of these again," he groaned, before he raised the rifle with a heave and fired, hitting the cube; it jerked backwards and fell to the floor, like the first one had. The effort had nearly knocked the Doctor backwards, but Rose's weight kept him in balance. The Doctor then pivoted and faced the other cube, which paused as he aimed and fired again. This time the bullet struck a shield surrounding the cube, melting and absorbing it. Jack was right, of course; the cubes could adapt to weaponry, apparently very, very rapidly. However, it made little difference, because in the moment of this distraction, the Doctor pelted past it, keeping Rose slung over his shoulder.

Running with a human being slung over one's back, while holding a gun in one hand wasn't the easiest thing the Doctor had done, and though he hated treating Rose like a shield, he knew that while she was in its range, the cube behind him wouldn't dare fire its incinerator. For now, she protected them both. The Doctor panted as he ran, his shoulders and neck screaming in protest. Carrying a human adult, though tiring, wasn't too difficult for a Time Lord. Running and carrying a human adult was a different matter entirely.

Then he realized that he hadn't seen any other cubes appear, only the one that now gave chase. Where were the others? Surely there weren't only two security cubes in the ship?

Then he heard a loud, buzzing drone behind him, and some force knocked him face forward, causing Rose to fly off his shoulder and land nearby with a loud thud as he slid across the floor a couple of feet. The Doctor groaned and tried to get up again, but found it painful to move.

"Stun ray," he thought. "I should have known."

He wasn't certain what the cube coming behind him intended to do now that Rose was out of his grasp; all he was aware of was the pain and the hum of the approaching cube. Then a shadow fell over him, and he was almost certain that the cube had taken aim, fully prepared to kill him, but then he heard a loud crash and a familiar yell. Then there was a deafening bang, and someone swore.

"Jack?" he muttered, trying to look up.

A strange crunching sound reached the Doctor's ears in reply. A moment later, a pair of strong hands pulled the Doctor to his feet. He swayed and Ianto Jones grabbed him and pulled his arm over his shoulder.

"You all right?" he asked. "Damn, that looked like it hurt."

"Cube?" the Doctor grunted.

"Took care of it, Doc," Jack told him, holding up the cube. It looked as though Jack had smashed his gun into its glowing spherical center, which looked to be a weak point. Jack then tossed it away, and demanded, "Why the hell did you think you could manage that without us?"

Before the Doctor could argue any further, he saw Jack gather up Rose and run off with her.

"C'mon," Ianto said, pulling the Doctor along the control room. "Jack's got her now. I think they'll leave us alone."

* * *

><p>The Doctor had felt initial fear that he and Ianto would encounter more security cubes, but to his surprise, they saw none. The Doctor wondered again at this; surely there were more protecting the ship? But the more he thought about it, the more likely it was that the lack of security was the Daleks' doing. The security forces of the Void Ship <em>Eternal <em>had overpowered the Daleks, but only just. There were only a few left.

Ianto's assertion that the robots would leave him alone now that he no longer had Rose also proved to be correct, and the slow trip back from the control room, down the main corridor, and out the liquid energy doorway was fairly uneventful, though for the Doctor, painful. Fortunately, he could feel his strength returning, but their escape was still slow progress.

Jack's earlier assertion that the engines had shut down, based on the ship's change of ambience, turned out to be quite accurate, because when the Doctor and Ianto stepped out into the wreckage of Torchwood Tower, they saw that the accretion of electrical energy and the whirlpool of light had vanished. The ship no longer was moving into singularity mode; the potential black hole had closed.

Magambo and Mace were waiting for them. "Is he hurt?" the latter asked Ianto as he pulled the Doctor toward the Tardis.

"'M fine," the Doctor mumbled.

"I think he'll be all right," Ianto told them. "Did the others come through?"

Magambo nodded. "They went inside the Tardis. Harkness came out carrying a woman."

"Good. If I were you, I'd get out of here," Ianto looked at the ship. "We're being followed; the ship's security is interested in that woman. If they come out, I don't think they'll be interested in you, but you still should stay clear."

Mace looked at the Doctor, who nodded in agreement.

"We'll inform you if we need you," Ianto assured them.

The two UNIT officers looked at each other, and then reluctantly moved from the room. Ianto pulled the Doctor toward the Tardis, wincing as he put one foot in front of the other, repeating the same drill that had gotten them out of the Void Ship. By this point, the aching had faded from his legs, but the pain from the stun ray had not completely vanished from his head and chest, so the walking remained difficult. Ianto helped the Doctor across the shrapnel; as he did so, he looked back over his shoulder, keeping a wary eye on the Void Ship, before reaching forward and pushing on the Tardis door.

"It's locked!" he hissed.

"Which is as it should be," the Doctor sighed, fumbling in his suit pocket for the key. After a second, he produced it from his pocket and slid it into the lock, but his hand was shaking so badly that he could barely turn it. Seeing this, Ianto brushed his hand out of the way and easily turned the key. The door swung open, and together they fell through, the Doctor grabbing one of the hand rails inside the console room as Ianto straightened, looked out of the door, and then slammed it shut.

"A couple of those things just barely came out," he told him, before turning to survey the inside of the Tardis. "Dimensionally transcendental, as Jack said?" he observed. "Now I remember from Torchwood One. One dimension fits around another."

"Bigger on the inside," the Doctor muttered. "You know, I _love_ it when they just say, 'It's bigger on the inside.'"

"Yeah, yeah, I've disappointed you," Ianto snorted, before glancing nervously at the door. "Can they get in?"

"I doubt it," the Doctor said, pulling himself to his feet. "It'd take more than a few incinerator cubes to get through that door, even if they were built by Helials." He stumbled to the console, and turned the screen towards himself, fiddling with some of the controls as he did.

"What are you doing?" asked Ianto.

The Doctor didn't reply, looking instead toward the other door. "I assume Jack took everyone to the infirmary. Follow me."

…

Jack groaned as he lowered Rose onto the examination table, and straightened, massaging his left shoulder. It was to his luck that the Tardis had placed the infirmary close to the console room this time, only one door down from his left. Rose didn't stir the entire trip, which came as no surprise to Jack. The anesthetic he'd used ought to give them at least an hour or two.

Donna, Martha, and Gwen were already in the infirmary, waiting for him to arrive. He looked at Gwen, and then took her hands and examined her wrists.

"I'm fine, Jack," she protested. "She didn't hurt me. Really, I'm all right."

Jack released her. "Just making sure."

"Where's the Doctor?" asked Donna, sounding worried.

"Ianto's got him. He's hurt."

Martha, who had been looking at the inert Rose with interest, looked up sharply. "Is he all right? What happened?"

"He'll be fine in half an hour or so," Jack said with a shrug, "but I don't envy the headache he'll have for the next few days."

He fell silent as he looked back at Rose. When she first appeared before them on the Void Ship, he couldn't believe his eyes. The cube shot him dead before he could do or say anything, but he woke back up only seconds later, and this enabled him to watch her movements, and tried to follow her. Then he saw the cubes moving Gwen, and had to lie still again. After that he had to change course, which, of course, led him to Rose anyway.

Jack still didn't fully understand the details of what had happened to her, but if there was anything he did know, it was that he would not rest until Rose Tyler was restored to her former self.

After what seemed like ages, the Doctor finally stumbled into the infirmary, a hesitant Ianto following him inside, and Martha and Donna immediately ran forward to help the Doctor into a chair by the examination table. They didn't get far, however, before the Doctor shook them off.

"There's no need," he grunted. "It was only a stun ray. I'll be fine in a few minutes. Don't make a fuss."

He san into the chair with a groan, and rubbed his forehead for a moment, before turning his attention to where Rose lay on the table. The others watched him with concern for a moment, before they too turned attention back to the object of his scrutiny. Donna, who was nearest, hesitantly ran her fingers over one of Rose's implants, half-fascinated, half-horrified.

"Don't damage or pull those out," the Doctor warned her sharply.

Donna immediately withdrew her hand, as though the implant had burned her. "That would kill her?" she asked, looking at the Doctor, who pulled his chair closer to the table and opened up a drawer beneath, sorting through some tools.

He nodded. "Rose's mind is still connected to Eve. All the neurotransmitters in her brain are also sending interactive signals as well as electrical impulses. If we rip the implants off before deactivating Eve, not only could it damage the brain tissues, but it also would cause an electrical surge."

Martha also had bent down over Rose's face, examining the implants with a professional fascination, but not touching them. "Then how do we help her?' she asked, without looking up. Donna reflected upon their good fortune that Martha was a doctor herself, and would be able to help out more than most.

The Doctor, after he found what he was looking for, pushed himself out of his chair and slowly stood up, arching his back slightly as he did.

"That's a bit better," he sighed, before sidling to the head of the table, so that he was looking right down at Rose's face. He bent down, and lifted his hand to gently trace her forehead. "We're going to have to get Eve to release its hold on her," he answered Martha. "Otherwise, there's no way to separate machine from flesh."

Jack, still standing by the door next to Ianto and Gwen (who had held back awkwardly), spoke up for the first time. "If we're going to disconnect Rose from this computer thing, we're first going to have to find out exactly what it did to her, internally as well as externally."

The Doctor agreed, and raised Rose's right arm, and rolled up her sleeve so that her shoulder was exposed; he then pressed the silver instrument he had taken from the drawer into her upper arm. There was a small click, and the Doctor gently put her arm down. He then turned and beckoned for Jack to approach. He then handed him the instrument. "It's collected a blood sample," he said. "Martha, I want you and Jack to analyze Rose's blood cells and her DNA, and anything else you might find in there."

Martha straightened and followed Jack into a back room, both discussing how to use the DNA analyzer. The Doctor looked sadly at Rose again, before turning to Gwen and Ianto. "I want you two to go back to the console room and keep an eye on those cubes outside. You can watch them through the screen on the console. Also, I directed the Tardis to analyze the Void Ship. There's a smaller screen on one of the console panels, which will show the readings, so one of you can watch that as well. The console will sound an alarm if it starts to open a breach again. If that happens, let me know immediately."

Gwen and Ianto assured him that they understood his instructions and quitted the room. The Doctor slowly sank back into the chair, shutting his eyes for a moment.

"Are you sure you're all right?" Donna asked, worried.

"I'll be fine in a few minutes," he repeated, rubbing the back of his neck. "Whatever that cube hit me with, it hurt a lot. Which, of course, was the intention."

Donna nodded and turned back to the table to scrutinize the Doctor's former companion curiously. When unconscious, Rose was a picture of serenity, not at all the cold, emotionless machine they had encountered. When Donna had first met the Doctor, it had taken her a while to trust him, and Rose's death was the primary reason. From Donna's perspective, it had been months since the incident at Canary Wharf, for the Doctor, it had only been a few minutes. He had been in complete shock at Donna's unexpected appearance, but when she took the time to look at him more closely, she also saw his lingering anguish at his loss.

But now here she was: Rose Tyler was alive, but only just.

The Doctor stood again, this time somewhat more quickly than he had before, and bent low over her face, studying the implants. The largest one was attached to her temple, and the wires and tubes, most of which were inserted into various places on her scalp, ran from it. The mechanism ran further down Rose's cheek and along the angle of her jaw to her neck; there it connected to another implant which was clasped around her neck like a collar.

"Fascinating," the Doctor whispered, pointing his sonic screwdriver at the main implant. His voice had lost most of the horror and sadness as he turned his attention back to the problem at hand. "That appears to be an extension of the main computer; the wires and tubes all feed into her brain, originally with the purpose of using advanced, automated microsurgery to repair her central nervous system."

"What about the collar?" asked Donna.

The Doctor scanned it carefully. "It's connected directly to her brain stem, making sure that her heart and lungs are still working." He stepped back, looking slightly relieved. "That implant kept Rose alive, but her mind is repaired now, so her vital organs should be working independently again. There are no medical complications. Once we separate her from Eve, she should go back to normal."

"Do you think she's aware in there?" Donna asked quietly, voicing the question she had wondered since Jack first brought Rose in the infirmary.

The Doctor didn't answer for a while. He simply scrutinized Rose, looking both worried and contemplative. "I hope not," he finally answered. "So much has happened in the last few hours I wouldn't want Rose to be aware of. Anyway, there's no telling how long she was on that Void Ship, and how much she'd remember."

"But…" Donna waved her hand at the motionless woman on the table. "What if she's been watching all this time? What if she saw Eve kill that Jimmy Stone, or if she saw what she did to Jack, what she tried to do to Gwen, or any of it?"

The Doctor opened his mouth, and then closed it again, clearly considering what to do about this possibility. Then he said, "We'll just have to reassure her that we…"

He was interrupted when a sudden exclamation echoed from the other room, followed by Jack swearing. Donna and the Doctor both looked in that direction, the latter looking curious and wary. The former merely groaned.

"I'm guessing things are about to go pear-shaped?" she said dryly.

"More than it already has?" the Doctor said sarcastically. "You know, there's a reason I hate that fruit."

A moment later, Jack reappeared in the infirmary, looking upset; an equally dismayed Martha was close behind him.

"What's happened now?" the Doctor asked.

"Cybernetic life support?" Jack repeated the Doctor's earlier words incredulously. "Doctor, Eve completely rewrote Rose's DNA! She's not even really human anymore!"

Whatever the Doctor was expecting, it wasn't that. "Let me see!" he said, moving past Jack to join him and Martha in the back room. As they left, none of them noticed Rose's unconscious form shift a little, and the mechanical fingers slowly curl and uncurl.

* * *

><p>"You gave me life! What else have you given me?" the Dalek shrieked as she backed further against the bulkhead, terrified and confused, unsure of whether it meant to kill her or not.<p>

"'_I can't get out,' said the starling—God help thee! Said I, but I'll let thee out, cost what it will; so I'd turn'd about the cage to get to the door; it was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces."_

She and the Doctor backed against the stone wall, protected only by an iron gate, but the dead, manipulated by the Gelth like marionettes, pushed against it, their arms flailing through the bars to grasp at them. The Doctor took her hand. "I'm so glad I met you," he told her sadly.

The wolf whimpered as the scorpion flexed its tail again, readying itself to administer its poison again, even though the wolf appeared to have given up. It lay in its cage, weaker and unhealthier than ever, its entire form quivering. But the calls it had made previously were enough for help to arrive. Suddenly the cage was illuminated with fiery orange light, and the wolf opened its eyes to see that a fiery, eagle-like bird, a phoenix, had materialized between it and the scorpion, screeching angrily, its wings and its fire outstretched, protecting the whimpering beast in the cage.

_On the eve of the Day of Imperial Observance, a report from the Mutter's Spiral galaxy reached the Senate of Taledrev that the empire of Skaro had descended upon the planet Gallifrey in the zenith of the Chronarchs' revolution. Surrounded by ten million Dalek battleships, the Gallifreyans were outnumbered and unprepared for the assault; nevertheless, they managed to hold back the Daleks' attack and push them out of their planet's atmosphere. Now they were under siege. Debate immediately commenced among the Senators over what action to take concerning the arising Time War. _

* * *

><p>"The first thing we noticed was that the scanner couldn't classify Rose's DNA, so we took a closer look," Jack told the Doctor, who was bent over the computer screen with his glasses on, scrutinizing the results. "She's got the same four nucleobases as all Earth biology, but there are two alien nucleobases I've never seen before."<p>

"Why change her DNA?" asked Donna.

"Could have been any reason," the Doctor said, his voice intense. "Maybe Eve couldn't function properly with a human body, and changed her simply for compatibility, or maybe the medical program wasn't certain how to fix a human body. That's happened in the past with nanogenes, as you well know, Jack."

He shot Jack an irritated look, and the latter threw his hands up in the air. "You make one mistake, just one…" he grumbled.

"It's worse than that," Martha cut off his muttering. "That was only the first thing we noticed… until this happened."

She turned a dial, and backtracked the scanner to show the strand of DNA from two minutes previous. "Watch it… keep watching."

She pointed at the sequence locked in the double helix. A second later, a second molecule wound its way up the spiral unraveling it and breaking apart and replacing the nucleotides as it went; an identical process occurred with the second strand. This all happened in a split second, but one could hardly miss it.

"What was that?" asked Donna, stunned.

"That was a highly developed telomerase molecule," the Doctor answered. He looked as upset as Martha. "It forced her DNA to reconstruct itself. Just like Lazarus."

Martha nodded understandingly.

"But this…" The Doctor waved his hand at the scanner. "This is different. There are no flaws, there's no mutation. It's perfect."

"Doctor," Jack snapped irritably, "stop speaking in circles. What's happening to Rose?"

The Doctor's gaze went downcast. "She is regenerating."

There was a long, uneasy silence. Then Martha said, "I thought only Time Lords do that."

He shook his head. "Rose is not regenerating like a Time Lord. We regenerate suddenly and violently on the cellular level when we are close to death. When that happens, our physical appearance changes, and certain, minor aspects of our personality change too, but our essence remains… and Time Lords can only regenerate twelve times." The Doctor took a deep breath, and glanced at Martha and Jack before turning his gaze back to the screen. "But what's happening here is quiet and cyclical, a more refined version of what Richard Lazarus was trying to achieve. It's not just Rose's cells; in a sense, her DNA itself is regenerating, and it's regenerating _perpetually._"

"I thought you said it didn't work like that," Martha argued. "You remember what happened when Lazarus tried it."

"What Lazarus did was unnatural and artificial," the Doctor replied. "But some races perpetually regenerate by nature. For some, this is a quirk of evolution."

Jack instantly picked up on his line of thought. "These Helials Martha told me about, they could do this?"

"Yes," the Doctor confirmed. "I said that the Helials were almost as ancient as the Time Lords, and this is why they lasted so long. They regenerate on the molecular level every moment, every day, meaning that a Helial's lifespan is unlimited… so long as they have adequate sustenance."

"And that's what's happening to Rose," Donna said.

The Doctor nodded glumly. "Eve needed Rose alive, and it couldn't have her aging or dying, so thinking like any computer programmed to survive, it eliminated the problem. Using nanosurgery, and imitating the Taledrevan regeneration element, it flooded Rose's cells with Helial telomerase which constantly repair her telomeres and any other damage to her DNA, while also removing any anomalies in the nucleotide sequence, thus preventing throwbacks similar to the creature Lazarus mutated into. In a biological sense, she's immortal. She's not invulnerable to death, but she'll never age."

He stood up straighter, staring off into space. "Now I really, _really _hope Rose isn't aware in there. With this going on, there's no way to tell, either by appearance or by genetic analysis, how old she is. She could have been on that Void Ship for a million years and she wouldn't have aged a day."

The others stared at him, trying to wrap their minds around this. The Doctor, as though unable to look at the results of the DNA analysis any longer, led them back into the infirmary, where he immediately went back to Rose's side, staring at her as though he'd never seen her before. He was visibly shaking, though it wasn't clear if this was due to the shock of their discovery, or if he simply hadn't quite recovered from the stun ray. Either way, Jack and Martha pushed the Doctor back into his chair.

Trying to divert his attention, Martha asked, "The Helials could regenerate like this, so if they could live indefinitely, is that why they were an empire?"

The Doctor, though still very upset, managed to reply, "Yes… the exact reason. After they developed the ability, they overpopulated their planet very rapidly. Just by the nature of their existence, the Helials had to spread out in order to prevent their home world from spending eternity in chaos. They spread and conquered, and everywhere they went, they eventually overpopulated."

Jack swallowed. "If that's how it was, they wouldn't have stopped until they had overrun the whole universe."

The Doctor shook his head. "They wouldn't have even stopped there. The Helials had Void Ships, which means they must have been masters at travel between parallel universes. Once they had conquered this universe, they would have moved on to another, then another, without end." He looked at the floor, his face grim. "The extent of creation is infinite, but the lifespan of Helial civilization could also have been infinite. It would have been a never-ending race."

"Are they still around?" asked Donna, looking scared. "Eve said they hid in the Void, but if they decided to come back…"

The Doctor, still sadly watching Rose, could only reply, "There's no way to tell."

Jack looked at her too. "What about Rose?" he asked. "Let's say we successfully disconnect Eve from her. What about her DNA? Is there any way to change it back?"

The Doctor's eyes met Jack's and he understood. Rose wasn't immortal in the same sense as Jack was. She could die, although it was almost certain that her death would be a traumatic one, due either to violence or to starvation, which was a bleak enough prospect; but if she lived long enough, she would be cursed, as the Doctor and Jack were, to live a life alone, cut off from all she knew. To the two men in the room, who understood this better than anyone, this life was a bitter, lonely hell, which made it all the harder for the Doctor to tell Jack the truth.

"No," he said sullenly. "Once the regeneration ability is there, it's permanent. Any damage or change to her DNA, and it will just replace itself again. Rose is stuck like this."

They all fell into silence again, each to their own thoughts, so that the only sound was the hum of the Tardis, and the ticking of a clock on the opposite wall. It was hard to say how long they remained thus, but then the door opened and Ianto looked in. "There's now eight cubes outside, and they've started firing their incinerators at the entrance," he told the Doctor.

"They'd have to do better than that," the Doctor snorted.

"Keep watching them," Jack said. "I doubt they'll get in, but just in case…"

Ianto nodded and backed out. As the door closed again, a movement on the examination table caught the Doctor's eye, and he leapt up when he saw Rose's head slowly turn toward them. Her eyes were still closed, but the drug was clearly starting to wear off.

* * *

><p><strong>AN:  
><strong>**The quote about the starling trying to get out of a cage comes from Laurence Sterne's _A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. _**

**When I first planned this story years ago, I wanted to extend Rose's lifespan indefinitely, but very early on I made the decision to do so without involving Bad Wolf, or turning Rose into a Time Lord (which is actually something I don't really like doing; I've only seen a couple of stories where I thought that was done well). I wanted there to be a very utilitarian reason for her agelessness that has nothing to do with either her or the Doctor. **

**Now that we're this far into the story, I feel like I can tell you about the blog I have about "The Perennials," which doesn't really contain anything I haven't already revealed. It contains commentary, more in-depth explanations about what's been happening, as well as some illustrations, including concept art. For some reason the web site won't let me post the web address here, but there's a link on my profile page. **


	9. Chapter Eight: Caged Wolf

.

Chapter Eight  
>Caged Wolf<p>

"I can't believe you have one of these."

"Oi! They do work, you know."

"Except when you jostle them."

"All we need for it to work is to keep her in a sitting position," the Doctor protested. Jack snorted skeptically, and Martha looked between them oddly.

"Why?' she asked.

Jack rolled his eyes. "These things are really temperamental. The best results tend to come if they're level with a center of gravity. I don't know what you're doing with one, Doctor."

Martha and Donna both looked at the device in bewilderment: a steel instrument shaped to fit around a human head. The inside of the device was lined with what looked like solar power cells, although without any sun or intention of sunlight, clearly that's not what they were.

"What is it, anyway?" asked Donna. It vaguely reminded her of one of the spiked helmets Germans sometimes wore in historical films.

"Twenty-second century equivalent of an EEG scanner," Jack told her.

"They get much better readings of brain activity than those of the twenty-first century, and are must less of a hassle to use," the Doctor argued. "See, _much _better than attaching hundreds of electrodes to the patient's scalp. You simply put the cap on and flip the switch."

"But as I said," Jack shot back, "temperamental. And you accuse me of using a piece of junk, Doc?"

The Doctor wasn't amused. "It's the sort of thing we need for this, so stop complaining," he snapped. "And anyway, by your own calculations, we've only got about fifteen minutes before the drug wears off, so give us a hand here."

Jack shrugged, but slid his hands under Rose's back and knees. The Doctor did the same. Then the two of them lifted her off the table and sat her down in the chair the Doctor earlier had been sitting in. Rose's head ducked down limply. The Doctor then straightened and picked up the metal cap, which he then placed carefully on top of Rose's head. Beside him, Jack set up a matching screen on a small table, which the Doctor had earlier placed by the chair.

"It's started," he told the Doctor, who placed both hands on Rose's head and held it in a straightened position. "Keep her head level. That's better."

"Martha," the Doctor said, looking up at the two women, "Keep an eye on the heart monitor. And Donna, that monitor over there," – He nodded at a screen he had set up with an electrode newly attached to the implant on Rose's temple—"Tell me if the waves' frequency or magnitude increases. We'll know she's regaining consciousness when her heart starts to speed up, and if the waves on that screen increase, it means the interactive signals are getting stronger."

Martha nodded, and she and Donna each to position at their respective monitors. The first screen showed a green line rising and falling at a slow pace, and the second waves which moved quickly, but at a low amplitude.

"Scanner's starting to process the information." Jack watched the screen, then raised his eyebrows. "Doc, look at this."

The Doctor looked in his direction, and Jack turned the screen so the Doctor could see it. An image of a brain appeared there, with white spots indicating the metal implants. The image was mostly shown in red, surrounded by splotches of yellow and a couple of tiny spots in blue. He frowned.

"Blimey." He looked from the screen to Rose and back again. "That's a lot of neural activity for an unconscious person. Her entire brain's humming."

"Must be the implants," Jack put in. "You said that the computer itself isn't unconscious."

"Doctor," Martha called out from across the room, "her pulse is starting to increase."

This gave the Doctor pause. "By how much?"

"Not much, only a few beats per minute, but if it continues to increase at this rate…" Martha's voice trailed off.

"Thanks, Martha," the Doctor said sincerely. "Keep watching it, and let me know if it goes any higher. Now, it looks like the hottest spot for neural activity is the frontal lobe. That's where memory is typically stored, if I remember right."

He frowned, looking thoughtful. "That must be the database… and as for the blue…"

But as the Doctor's eyes moved toward the blue spots, Rose's head fell slightly, and the image immediately vanished; it was replaced by the word "SCANNING". The Doctor and Jack both let out roars of frustration.

"I told you!" Jack yelled. "Don't let her head move, Doctor! The system has to reboot every time she so much as twitches!"

"I know, I know!" the Doctor said angrily. "I don't need reminding!"

"Doctor," Donna called, but the Doctor, lost in his own thoughts, didn't hear her. His brow was furrowed in concentration.

"Come on," he said, running his fingers through his hair; his other hand remained under Rose's chin, holding her head in position. "Think, think, think! Red is increased brain activity, blue is low. And if I'm right, Rose's consciousness is stuck in the subconscious…"

"Do you think the blue indicates influences by the subconscious?" asked Jack, frowning. "You don't dream while unconscious."

"Could be," the Doctor said, "although it's not completely true that you don't dream while unconscious. But anyway, the subconscious isn't located in any particular lobe of the brain, but perhaps those are the neural weaknesses, or perhaps the connection between Eve and Rose. On the other hand, blue means low, not none. Something is going on there."

"Doctor," Martha said, but as with Donna, the Doctor didn't hear her.

"So the database is active. There's a storm of information in her head, but apart from that, she's unable to move or function," he said, his mind working at ninety miles an hour. "From what we've seen, the spots in blue are unconscious, but because of Eve, the rest is humming, meaning that something in Rose's subconscious has to be working for Eve to…"

"DOCTOR!" Martha and Donna both shouted at the same time. At that moment, several things happened.

The Doctor, suddenly realizing that both Martha and Donna had been trying to get his attention, looked up to see that Rose's heartbeat had reached a healthy pulse of seventy-one beats per minute, and never before had that been so alarming. The screen Donna had been monitoring had increased very noticeably in amplitude and in frequency. Jack let out a yell of surprise as the image came back on the screen, but this time, the spots that previously were in blue were now in yellow, and the red in dark red. As the Doctor's eyes fell on the scanner, he immediately looked back to Rose just in time to see her eyes snap open. Her head turned and her eyes fell on the Doctor, and before anyone could stop her, she reached for him with her mechanical hand, and the metal fingers closed around his throat.

Jack leapt up and tried to prise the fingers from the Doctor's neck, but they seemed to be frozen in place. Martha and Donna rushed over to help, but they all stopped when the Doctor, quite clearly and calmly, asked, "Going to kill me, Eve?"

He was looking directly into Rose's eyes. "Well?" he asked. "What are you waiting for? You've got me. I've sabotaged your ship and removed you from it. Your security cubes have surrounded the Tardis, but are unable to get in; clearly what I've done is enough to set off the self-defense protocols. You are programmed to survive. Your hand's around my neck, so why aren't you strangling me?"

There was a very long, strained silence. The Doctor scrutinized Rose intently as the others watched, all of them looking from one to the other, unsure of what to do or how to respond. Eve made no answer. Rose's face was still completely expressionless, the face of the emotionless entity that had taken control of her. Her countenance showed absolutely no sign either of backing down or of continuing with what the defenses surely required Eve to proceed with. But her eyes said differently.

The Doctor's hearts each skipped a beat as he looked into her eyes, and realized with a jolt that when she last was conscious, her eyes were as cold and emotionless as her face. But this time, the Doctor could see emotion burning behind those hazel orbs, and that emotion was fear.

The Rose's lips parted slightly, and a sound rattled out: "Doctor…"

The Doctor stared, forgetting about the mechanical fingers that still grasped his neck tightly, but not tightly enough to compress his windpipe. His mouth fell open.

"Doctor," she repeated.

It was Jack who spoke first. "Rose?"

"It's her!" the Doctor whispered in stunned disbelief. "It's Rose! She's fighting it!"

Jack turned to the screen. "Her entire brain is active."

"There's a psychological war going on inside her head," the Doctor observed, his voice hoarse.

"Hold on," Donna said, "if she can fight Eve, does that mean she can separate herself from it?"

"Donna, you're a genius!" the Doctor cried. Then he gagged as the fingers tightened a little. "Not good," he hissed. "Seems Eve's just as determined as Rose is."

"She's losing control," Jack said, his hands twitching. It was clear that he wanted to continue his attempt to remove Rose's hand from the Doctor's throat, but was uncertain whether he should. "That's the problem," he observed. "Rose is aware in there, and she can put up a fight, but Eve does not tire. Rose does."

"But that's it!" the Doctor whispered. "Donna, you've just found the key to her freedom. It's a two-way connection. We don't need to disconnect Rose from Eve; she can disconnect herself! But it takes enormous mental concentration for her to do so, and she tires quickly."

"The second she weakens, Eve regains control," Martha summed up.

The Doctor gagged again in confirmation to her words, and both he and Jack grasped at Rose's wrist, trying to pull her off him, but to no avail.

"Doctor…" Rose rasped again. Her voice was even weaker. "Third presence… Eve can't handle… you have to…"

Then she fell silent again. The Doctor stared, confused at her message, but then his eyes widened.

"Jack," he said in a calm voice, "take the sonic screwdriver. It's in my left pocket. Hold it against the implant on her temple. Setting three hundred and twenty-four."

Jack hesitated, then stooped down and put his hand in the Doctor's coat pocket, rummaging around until he found what he was looking for. He then stood, the screwdriver in his hands, and he rotated the dial to the right settings. He then walked around the Doctor, and aimed the screwdriver at the correct implant.

"What are you going to do?" Jack asked.

Instead of answering, the Doctor let go of Rose's wrist. He then raised both his hands and placed his fingers on Rose's right temple, and as close to her left temple as the implant allowed.

"I'm asking you to do this because you know her," he said to Jack. "Watch her face, her eyes. The moment you see Rose—the Rose you know—use the screwdriver."

The Doctor's fingers pressed against Rose's temple, and her eyes slowly closed. Then he himself shut his eyes, and made contact. The onslaught that followed nearly pushed him back out.

* * *

><p><em>Here is no water but only rock. Rock and no water and the sandy road. <em>Pain… there was a lot of emotional agony that rent the air. A fifteen-year-old Rose Tyler watched sadly as a twenty-year-old Mickey Smith wept in anguish, and an inexpensive coffin bearing the body of Rita Smith was lowered into the ground. _We therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. _

A wolf clawed at the bars of its cage, snarling loudly, but its captor, a gigantic black scorpion of roughly the same size, refused to relent. Its sting darted through the bars of the cage, and the wolf howled in pain, but still it stood its ground and snarled even more angrily. _Things aren't the way they were before. You wouldn't even recognize me anymore…_

"There's got to be some way!" Pete Tyler cried out, twisting around in a Cyberman's grasp to look behind him. "Maybe we can reverse it!" The daughter he never knew shook her head despairingly. "There's nothing we can do," she said, knowing that she was condemning Jackie Tyler to live the rest of her life as a Cyberman.

_Amaranthine. _

_What is that noise now? What is the wind doing? Nothing again nothing. _

_These are the stakes to make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark: we must either love each other, or we must die. _She was seven, and Jackie had not come home that night. Rose curled up in her bed, overcome with worry and bewilderment, her face streaked with tears. There was no noise, except for the muffled sounds of cars and the occasional shouts of people in the estate, who neither knew nor cared that a frightened seven-year-old girl was alone without her mother. Why was her Mum not here? Why was she alone?

_The decision of the Senate of Taledrev was unanimous. It was better by far for the Helials not to involve themselves in the Time War. There were some who considered lending their assistance to the Time Lords, due to the dual threat that the Daleks posed for both Gallifrey and Taledrev, but the words of Delvidir Taelmarr Drunnor, the prominent Imperator of the Vanguards, convinced the Senators of the military's proposed course of action: "Why should we? I defy anyone in this hall to give a convincing argument that can justify intervening. Why assist the Time Lords, the very same upstarts who stand in the way of our much-needed expansion? They retain a large portion of the Universe, which we will eventually need, and do they deserve it? We can civilize and enhance the civilizations in Mutter's Spiral, but the Time Lords ignore them."_

_Amaranthine._

She was strapped in an uncomfortable seat in a spaceship, with her eyes shut and her heart pounding, as though it were making an extra effort to cling to life, in fierce denial of the inevitable. But she could even see the red lights through her eyelids, the deadly storm of plasma and dust, and the darkness in the center as all matter was crushed. There was nothing, no point in fighting anymore, no escape, no hope, because the black hole's pull was far more powerful than her will. _Between the conception And the creation, Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow. _

"_Why assist the pompous Time Lord Elders? The Daleks are our enemies, but the Time Lords are our enemies too; I therefore propose a different solution: isolation. We follow the Time Lords' old policy and stay well away from the Time War. We build T.E. vessels and remove the Taledrevan race from this universe, to wait out the Time War in Nonexistence until it ends. Mark my words, the Time War can only end in stalemate, or in the destruction of both Skaro and Gallifrey. Without the Daleks or the Time Lords, what is there to hold us back? The glory of Taledrev will extend to Mutter's Spiral!"_

_Amaranthine._

It was as though some superhuman force had rent her body and soul; the pain was so intense, so all-consuming that she no longer knew who she was. The light penetrated every cell of her body, burning as it did, and though she was paralyzed by the agony, internally she screamed. "What's happening to me?" she cried. The voice of the Tardis replied, _"You desired this. You have absorbed my heart and my essence. You look now into the Time Vortex, and now we coalesce. The Doctor will be preserved."_

_I dream of rain, I dream of gardens in the desert sand, I wake in vain, I dream of love as time runs through my hand. _"Rose, hold on!" the Doctor shouted. She could feel the breach tugging at her, some unseen force that literally lifted her from the floor and pulled her away. She clutched the lever desperately, her fingers screaming in protest, but as they weakened, the Void's pull grew stronger, and she knew it was no good.

_This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. _

"Goodbye, Doctor," she mouthed, her eyes never leaving his. Then she gave up, and let go. The further she fell, the louder the wind howled, until she could no longer hear the Doctor's screams for the roar as the breach started to close, and she shut her eyes, waiting for oblivion to consume her.

"_Do you know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?" _I remember those are pearls that were his eyes. _"Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?"_

_Amaranthine. Amaranthine. Amaranthine. _

* * *

><p>As the eruption of data and memories came to its end, the Doctor felt the breach close and the feeling of falling overwhelmed him. The feeling of nothingness penetrated him, and he shut his eyes against the Void, hiding his face from hell itself. But as quickly as the falling started, it ended, and the Doctor felt darkness claim him.<p>

The first thing he became aware of was the smell of dew and rain, and he felt cool moisture on his skin. Then he became aware of the sounds of animals and wind all around him, and he opened his eyes and sat up.

He was sitting on a damp walkway constructed of mossy, hexagonal stones, and all around him, he could see trees with magenta bark branching out over him, water dripping from their cerulean leaves. He stood and stared, awestruck, at a stunning view of these trees growing in what appeared to be a swamp of strange plants and fungi; lichen covered a rock just below the ridge he stood on, and about twenty feet before him, an enormous flower with blue petals grew from the water, dark purple fronds extending from beneath it, like an enormous water lily. As he stared at this scene, a three-legged amphibian with a spiny ridge ambled its way across the lily's gigantic leaves, and dipped its head into the clear water.

The Doctor turned his gaze away from the magnificent scene and looked up the road, which wound its way up a mesa. He didn't know how or why, but something was nagging at him, telling him he needed to follow that path. So he did, wandering past more of these strange, blue plants and tall ridges, where equally strange animals blinked at him from within their burrows.

He did not tire at all as he clambered up a brick staircase. He wondered, as he walked, how this place had become the world hovering on Rose's subconscious, because he couldn't recall ever taking Rose to a place like this. But he didn't have time to reflect on this, before the path turned past the curve the mesa, and then he saw it: a wooden building, standing about four stories high, similar in architecture to a Japanese castle, and in the center a hexagonal tower extended upwards two stories, like a pagoda. It was situated on a shoreline that extended out into a misty seascape. The edifice faced the sea, and across the waters, the Doctor could see two suns setting on the horizon.

The same nagging feeling pushed him forward; something was telling him that the solution was waiting inside that building, and he kept walking until he stood in a garden filled with blue-green plants. On the other side of the garden he could see a small door, and not taking the time to examine the plants, the Doctor calmly walked to the door and opened it. He now stood in a large, clean room with pieces of furniture neatly arranged along the walls, and before a small fireplace. The walls were dark red or leafy green in color, with wood panels, and lined with bands of gold. There were no pictures, nothing to indicate any habitation.

Then he thought of the top floor, the pagoda, and the nagging feeling returned. The Doctor looked around and a spiraling stairwell caught his eye; he climbed it and found himself in a large corridor of the same kind of design as the room downstairs. The Doctor glanced around again, and caught sight of another door with windows of green glass. He opened this and saw a hexagonal atrium extending to the floor below and above him; at the top he could see a wooden ceiling with a bright, iron chandelier, above which he supposed the smaller, top-level tier was built.

He looked around again, and caught sight, two sides to the left, of what looked promisingly like a lift; so he made his way forward and turned the handle, and the door swung open. He stepped inside, shut the door, and then took hold of the golden handle he found to his left, turning it upwards. Immediately the lift gently ascended, the shaft gyrating past him as he ascended, and he caught a glimpse of the next floor as he went; then the lift slowed, and came to a stop. Hearts hammering in his chest, the Doctor reached forward, opened the elevator door, and stepped into the single-roomed tier at the top of the building.

It was a resplendent room with green walls about fifteen feet high, and a starry, domed ceiling, lit by a lamp hovering in the center, which had been designed to look a bit like a sun. Four of the six walls, tow to his left, and tow to his right, held bookshelves constructed from a red-brown wood, probably from the trees outside, and the last wall, directly across the room from him had a glass door which led to what looked like a balcony. Then he saw something which made his hearts stand still for a moment.

To his left, in front of one of the bookshelves, a desk, made from the same wood as the shelves, stood built into the room, and a blonde woman was slumped against it, her head resting in the crook her elbow forlornly. The Doctor ran over, stopping only when he was standing right above Rose, and he reached forward and placed his hand on her shoulder. When she showed no reaction, he wondered if she was asleep.

"You've arrived," a frail voice breathed. Then she raised her head and sat up, looking directly into his eyes. I'd hoped you'd find me."

The Doctor looked around, drew up another chair, and sat down beside her. He then took her hand, and studied her face intently.

Rose looked utterly exhausted; her face was very pallid, and there were dark marks encircling her eyes. She tried to smile weakly, but even that proved to be too great an effort, and she shut her eyes and leaned forward heavily.

The Doctor's hearts broke, and he covered her hand with both of his, choking back tears. "Rose, I…"

She opened her eyes and simply looked at him.

"I'm sorry," he finished lamely, swallowing the lump that had formed in his throat. "I'm so sorry for what's been done to you."

A single tear trailed down Rose's cheek. She blinked a couple of times, and whispered, "I can't fight it much longer. It's too hard."

She sounded like a lost child when she spoke, and the Doctor lifted his hand to trace her cheek. "You're tired," he said quietly, and Rose whimpered.

"Help me, Doctor," she pled. "I can't do this alone."

"Eve won't take over again," the Doctor gently promised her. "You said it yourself. It can't handle a third presence. You can rest for a while, so long as I'm here."

Rose sighed, and leaned back in her chair. The Doctor hesitated, then leaned forward and pulled her into his lap, cradling her in her arms. Then she relaxed, and buried her face into his shoulder. He shut his eyes and stroked her hair, torn with guilt at her enervated state, but rejoicing in the feel of her there once again. Then she began shaking, and he realized that she was softly sobbing into his shoulder. He couldn't help it; he cried too.

After a minute, Rose's weeping subsided; she didn't have the strength to continue crying, but she didn't pull away. The Doctor had no idea how long he sat there with Rose in his arms, but he kept her close, giving her as much rest and comfort as he could. It could have been minutes, hours, or even days that they stayed there, before Rose shifted in his arms, and then slid out of his lap. She stood, and then tugged his hand beckoningly, and he stood too. She then led him out of the room and out onto a balcony, from which he could see that one of the twin suns had yet to disappear from the horizon.

Rose nodded at a bench to their left, and they both sat, hand in hand, watching the sunset. Rose lay her head onto his shoulder wearily, and then she spoke up.

"I was so afraid," she said. "I didn't know what was happening to me at first. I've been in this place ever since I became aware again, but there's always something else here, like somebody is here with me and still not with me. Sometimes if I try hard enough, I can see what's happening in the real world… like trying to remember a dream, you know? But it never stops. The voice that always repeats numbers in my head, it never, ever stops." Her eyes watered again. "I killed him," she moaned, and the Doctor knew of whom she spoke. "I killed him, I killed Jack, and I tried to kill you too."

"No," he whispered, squeezing her hand reassuringly. "Eve killed Stone, and Jack's fine. The thing that disintegrated Stone, shot Jack, and tried to strangle me, that wasn't you, Rose. You stopped Eve from killing me. You saved my life."

This didn't put rose at ease. "It _used _me. It uses my memories, my knowledge, and it _hurts_, Doctor. What happened with Jimmy… it wasn't just my memories that led the computer to kill him. He appeared in my nightmares at that exact moment, because Eve saw him, and the moment I saw his face… I was so angry. I wanted to blast him into oblivion, and that's exactly what happened. Eve uses everything I have to do everything that I wouldn't."

The Doctor placed his arm around Rose's shoulders, letting her talk.

"It uses me," she continued, whispering. "It manipulates me, and it shoved me into a corner of my mind, leaving me a slave stuck in a virtual reality, and I've been like this for so long. It hurts so badly."

"I'm sorry, Rose," the Doctor repeated. "If I had known… I thought you were dead, Rose, but if I had known you'd survived…"

Rose raised her head, and looked at him again. Then tears ran down her face, and her head bowed forward. The Doctor leaned his forehead against hers, and he placed his hand on her cheek tenderly.

* * *

><p>The Doctor and Rose sat on the bench in silence for quite some time, watching the twin suns setting across the horizon. Rose appeared to be falling asleep, but the Doctor remained as alert as ever. He was an interference, and he could feel that; his presence had paralyzed Eve's domination of Rose's mind and body, and he knew that sooner or later, the artificial intelligence would try to push him out. He could already feel it studying him, but he kept his mind on the situation at hand.<p>

His position was clear now. It was either disconnect Eve, risking Rose's life in the process, or condemn Rose to a permanent, eternal state of imprisonment. She surely would not be able to put up a second fight after this, at least not for many years, judging by her weak condition, and the Doctor certainly knew what he would choose, were he in the same situation. He knew Rose would rather die than live in this hell, and he understood that. So it was now or never.

The world around him grew darker, and the sounds of the woods outside began to quiet, though the murmur of the ocean winds did not. Then, as the last sun set, the object of the Doctor's thoughts stirred, as though she could hear his thoughts.

"I'm ready."

The Doctor looked at Rose. She still looked tired, but a new determination appeared in her eyes, a look he immediately recognized from her days on the Tardis. Smiling, he asked her, "Are you certain?"

She nodded, and stood. "I've been stuck here for too long. I've had enough."

The Doctor followed her back into the library. Rose led him to the desk and sat down on one of the chairs. She gestured to the other chair, indicating that he should do the same.

"You say that you have dreams or nightmares in this state?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's about the only thing I have any kind control over," she commented. "At least sort of." She frowned. "Why doesn't Eve subdue my subconscious? It generates hallucinations to scare me, sometimes, but aside from that… I'm supposed to be completely subdued, after all."

There was something in her tone of voice that made the Doctor stare at her in slight surprise, but he shook it off, and replied, "I don't think Eve can control your subconscious. Not completely, anyway. By grasping it, you grasp the only thing with which Eve cannot obstacle you, the access terminal. It exists because your connection with Eve is two-way. It's there whether Eve likes it or not."

He smirked, and then added, "It was my friend Donna who figured out Eve's weakness, but you've been using it from the beginning."

"Explains a lot, actually," Rose thoughtfully, and the Doctor nodded, before looking at Rose intently.

"Now listen closely," he said urgently, "because this may be your greatest weapon. You must not forget that this is not the real world, nor are your dreams."

"I know they aren't," Rose interrupted, but the Doctor ignored her.

"Your dreams are the incongruent reality that exists only within your soul," he continued. "Because they are all you have left, you can control them. They are lucid dreams, the world of your imagination, and therefore they are subject to _your_ rules, not the rules of physical reality and logic that Eve follows. As you said, Eve can set up hallucinations"—he looked at the domed ceiling and the door that led to the balcony—"elaborate hallucinations, judging by this place, but as we have discovered, it has no control over your dreams. Therefore, we must plunge you deep into your subconscious to break you out of here."

Rose nodded, and the Doctor again placed his hands over her temples. "Though Eve cannot control your subconscious, it can still put up a fight for physical control, and it will. I'm here to keep its focus on me, so that instead of fighting it yourself, you'll be able to concentrate on regaining control again." He looked directly into Rose's eyes. "You_ must_ focus on the real world, not on what you may see or hear. Only then will you able to defeat Eve."

Rose nodded again, and they simply looked at each other for a moment. Then Rose shut her eyes and braced herself, and the Doctor pressed his fingers into her temples, and closed his eyes as well.

Everything collapsed around them.

* * *

><p>The library vanished, and instead Rose suddenly saw the shapes of trees all around her, but all was dark. Everything was as black and cold as death itself. The path she stood on wound along a stream, here and there between the indifferent trees, further into the mist. Like Theseus's ball of string, the stream marked an easy path through the impassible labyrinth of misleading paths and mocking trees. And so she began wandering down the twisting stream, further and further into the darkness, following the sound of running water.<p>

Then all went deathly quiet, even the water, as a shape began to take form before her, like one of the ghosts of Canary Wharf. As she watched, the image came into focus and she realized that she was looking at a mirror image of herself… only this other Rose had cybernetic implants attached to her face and scalp, and her expression was so cold and calculating that Rose found herself taking a step backward.

"It is pointless to resist, Amaranthine," Eve said quietly.

Rose blinked at the image, and at that moment, the darkness thickened, until the forest faded completely, so that her other self was all there was to see. Rose shuddered, and shut her eyes, turning away from her captor, and allowing the darkness to envelop her. She could see nothing, again nothing.

"You are part of me, and I am part of you," the monotonous voice of Eve continued. "You tire, and you lose your focus. You cannot escape from me."

"Ignore it, Rose." A second voice spoke, like a quiet friend that led her away from Eve. In the distance, she thought she heard someone say, _"He sure is taking his time._"

A male voice responded, _"I thought I saw something there. Martha, did you see something?"_

"Return to your sanctuary," she heard Eve say, but the other voice interrupted.

"Leave her alone!"

"_Wonder what's going on in there?"_

Something prodded Rose toward the voices, some instinct that told her to follow them. The darkness seemed to lift, and finding strength again, she wandered in the direction she judged the voices to be coming from. So did she continue for some time, until a light appeared before her, and the voices grew louder. A warm feeling flowed through her, as though sunlight had fallen upon her.

Rose quickly walked toward the light, but then the warmth suddenly began to ebb away. Rather than cold, however, she felt nothing except something firm on her shoulder. Looking down, Rose was horrified to see a metal hand resting there, holding her back. Trying to free herself, Rose attempted to run, but the hand on her shoulder tightened its grip. Eve would not permit her to follow the voices.

"Oh no you don't!" the Doctor's voice snarled. "This is her mind, not yours! You have no right to it!"

The hand only gripped her shoulder more tightly, but then she felt something else, what she guessed to be a second hand trying to pry the mechanical hand from her.

In the light, an image started to come into Rose's view, what looked like the blurred outline of a person.

"Rights are irrelevant," Eve argued coldly. "My purpose is to survive."

But its voice sounded oddly distorted, like a badly-tuned radio. Rose took this as a sign to continue resisting, and using all her strength, she tried to wrestle herself from the monster's grip. But its hand tightened, until intense agony shot through her shoulder.

At the same time, however, she could now clearly see the Doctor in front of her, his eyes closed in deep concentration, but not the projection who had appeared in the library. The Doctor's disembodied voice spoke again, low and dangerous. "You've picked the wrong enemy," he warned. Rose immediately recognized that tone of voice: the merciless wrath of the Oncoming Storm that he had unleashed when the Krillitanes trapped hundred of school children, when Cassandra had attempted to murder everyone on Platform One, and when he faced the Dalek under the salt flats of Utah.

"I'm the Doctor," he hissed. "You have Rose's memories. What are they telling you about me?"

Eve stopped pulling on Rose's shoulder. It turned its attention to the Time Lord, and in doing so, it made the greatest mistake of its existence: it loosened its grip. Rose knew that it would tighten again in a moment, but a moment was all she needed. She tore herself from Eve's influence, and suddenly she could feel the physical world, a sense she had not truly had for ten thousand years.

A sensation of warmth filled her, not the mental warmth of hope she felt when the Doctor found her, but true, blunt, physical temperature, the heating of the infirmary. Feeling came back into her arms and legs and neck, and the impression that a great burden had been lifted came upon Rose. Where it had once taken enormous mental concentration, it now as a very simple and easy task for her to turn her head to the left, so that Jack Harkness came into view.

It was even easier for her to say, "Do it, Jack."

The last thing she heard before blacking out was the buzz of a sonic screwdriver.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: There are a number of cultural and literary references in the scene when the Doctor first connects to Rose's mind. They include T.S. Eliot's _The Wasteland_, and _The Hollow Men_; The Book of Common Prayer; Linkin Park's _In the End; _Lindon B. Johnson's "Daisy ad"; and Sting's _Desert Rose. _**

**Only one chapter after this. Stay tuned. And don't forget to check out the blog. Link's on my profile page. **


	10. Chapter Nine: The Awakening

.

Chapter Nine  
>The Awakening<p>

Jack fell backwards into a chair as the entire Tardis lurched. The Doctor tumbled sideways to the floor next to Jack, who saw Donna also stumble. Martha managed to stay upright because she fell forward against the examination table with a gasp. Somewhere in the room, Jack could hear glass shattering, and he saw a light fall from the ceiling and smash an inch from the Doctor's head. The floor continued to tremble violently, but Jack made an effort to stand. "Won't be a minute!" he called as he stumbled out of the room, though he wasn't sure anyone heard him.

He gingerly crossed the short distance from the infirmary to the console room, struggling to retain his balance, where he could see the many pipes and tubes running from the ceiling swaying back and forth, and a shell-shocked Gwen leaning on the frame of the console for support, also barely able to keep her balance. Ianto had stumbled away from the console, and seemed to have fallen painfully against one of the railings. The three of them looked at each other for a moment, then without a word, Jack staggered to the doors and put his hand on the handle.

"Those cubes are out there!" Ianto warned, but Jack had already opened the door and peered outside.

The now ten cubes Ianto had warned him about had all retreated from the Tardis doors and crowded around the Void Ship, which appeared to be the cause of the quaking. The truncated icosahedron's internal glow had returned, but this time it was an angry red. It was shaking violently, and once again, it seemed to be pulling energy toward it, invisible energy, but Jack could feel it, a centripetal motion, some force being pulled away. It made his hair stand on end.

Ianto and Gwen joined Jack's side in time to see several pieces of debris fall from the wrecked ceiling, which burst into flames as they struck the Void Ship. Even as they watched, the red glow brightened into a hot white, and a sudden wave of heat washed over them, like stepping into an oven. Then the cubes all convulsed, and like balls of dust into a vacuum cleaner, some force pulled them all into the Void Ship, and the moment the cubes struck its surface, they burst into molten fragments.

Then several of the pentagonal sides exploded outwards, and flames erupted from the remaining holes. It was at that moment that Magambo and Mace entered the room again, and Jack yelled, "Stay back!"

They didn't need telling twice, but at that second the burning polyhedron seemed to sway toward the Tardis, and in unison Jack, Ianto, and Gwen took a step backwards, prepared to slam the doors shut.

But the Void Ship didn't roll over. With a blinding flash of light, it unleashed a second wave of energy, knocking over the three of them and the two UNIT officers, as it imploded.

* * *

><p>"What the <em>hell <em>was that?" Martha shouted once the shaking stopped.

Nobody answered. Martha straightened and took a look around the infirmary, to see that the place was a wreck. Equipment and small tools littered the floor, and the glass from broken phials had scattered everywhere, leaving small puddles of multi-colored fluids. Donna and the Doctor lay on the floor close by, both groaning with pain and shock, and Jack was nowhere to be seen. The only other person who hadn't fallen to the floor was Rose, who was leaning forward heavily, her head hanging limply.

Seeing that Rose was about to fall out of the chair, Martha moved forward and pushed the other girl into a sitting position. Rose's face was still chalk white, but her eyes were shut, and seemed to look darker than ever, so that she simply looked tired and ill. When she didn't move, Martha placed her fingers against her jugular vein. To her relief, she found a fast but healthy pulse. Martha wasn't sure what happened, but at least Rose had survived the ordeal.

As Donna sat up and moaned, clutching her head, Martha took the chair Jack had vacated, and watched the Doctor's formerly dead companion closely for any sign, any symptom of regaining consciousness. After a minute, color started to return to Rose's face, and as her head rolled to the side, she let out a long groan.

The Doctor sat abruptly at the sound and clambered to his feet, and at the same time, Jack, Gwen, and Ianto entered the room.

"Magambo and Mace are waiting outside, Doctor," he announced as Donna stood too. "They want to talk to you. And the Void Ship's gone. It must have self-destructed."

"Good," the Doctor said absently, his eyes on Rose; he clearly was not listening. Jack sniggered.

"Actually it is good," he said, and the Doctor looked up, perplexed as he realized what Jack had actually said. "The last thing I need is to store something that dangerous, or for it to fall into UNIT's hands—no offense, Martha."

"None taken," she answered, also somewhat amused.

They all jumped when a faint voice groaned, "Oh God…"

Rose raised her head, and felt her forehead with her right hand, massaging her right temple, but not reacting to the implant on her left. She then looked at them all in turn with bloodshot eyes. The Doctor instantly knelt in front of her, looking at her curiously.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

Rose didn't answer immediately. She looked around again, and lifted her arm to look at the prosthetic hand. After flexing the metal fingers experimentally, she looked up.

"Not quite normal," she finally said wearily. Then she shook her head, and added, "I need a bed and some aspirin."

For the first time since they had found Rose on the Void Ship, the Doctor truly smiled. "Come on," he said gently. "Let's get you to bed. Tomorrow we'll do something about the implants. Should be easy, now."

As the Doctor and Jack helped Rose stand, Donna asked curiously, "How much do you remember?"

A faraway look appeared in Rose's expression, and she stared off into space.

"All of it," she whispered.

* * *

><p>It was by habit the next morning that Martha woke up early. With a yawn, she turned over to look at the alarm clock on her bedside table, to see that it was six o' clock in the morning. Apparently UNIT's early hours had eliminated Martha's need for an alarm clock.<p>

The first thing she became aware of as she sat up was that her stomach was growling, and suddenly Martha realized that she hadn't eaten anything since her lunch at the café just before the explosion. The events in the hours following, the danger and the stress, and the shocking discovery inside the wrecked skyscraper, had tired everyone, and after calling work to take a few days off, Martha had gone straight to her old room in the Tardis, and collapsed on her bed.

She lay back, and reflected on the events in the hours past. The day before, Martha had gotten up expecting another rather ordinary day working at UNIT, apart from the heavy rain. Now she was back in the Tardis after helping stop a black hole from consuming Earth, and suddenly her predecessor on the Tardis, Rose Tyler, had turned up alive but irrevocably altered.

Her stomach grumbled again, and Martha slid out of bed with another yawn. After putting on a dressing gown, she quitted her room and made her way to the kitchen, where she was mildly surprised to see Donna seated at the table, sipping some coffee.

"Morning," Donna greeted as Martha entered.

"You're up early," Martha commented as she took a seat, and Donna put her cup down.

"Couldn't sleep," she muttered. "I'll probably pass out some time this afternoon, but you know… exciting life."

Martha nodded in agreement. "Yeah. Explosions and implosions and Void Ships, dead Daleks… the Doctor's life, basically."

"Yeah. And Rose Tyler's suddenly alive." Donna sipped her coffee again, and glanced at the door, looking worried. "She'll be all right, yeah?"

"The Doctor says she will be," Martha answered, although she wasn't sure that was really true. The thought of that kind of captivity, even for a moment, made her shiver. That entire incident was a disturbing experience on more than one level. Feeling a sudden need for something to do, Martha got up and started rummaging around the cupboards, carefully avoiding odd alien foods as she went, until she found some tea bags. As Martha proceeded to make some tea, Donna spoke up again.

"She must have been completely wiped out by that experience," she remarked, "because I don't know how else she could sleep with those _things_ on her face."

Martha took a seat across the table from Donna, who yawned widely. Still dwelling on all that had happened, Martha asked, "What would you do, if you were suddenly ageless?"

Donna gave her an odd look. "Why do you ask?"

Martha shrugged. "I dunno. Some people would sell their souls for it, but really, so many decisions are made when they are _because _nobody lives forever. After traveling with the Doctor, I've come to the conclusion that it's for the best that our lifespans are relatively short."

They sat in silence for a long time, both deep in thought. Martha stood and removed the tea bag from her cup, then reached for the sugar bowl. After sweetening the tea to her taste, she sat down again, and took a long sip. After a few minutes, Donna drained her cup, then put in the sink before quitting the room, pausing only to say something about a shower, leaving Martha to her thoughts.

Once she finished her tea, Martha, considered the woman they'd just extracted from an alien ship drifting beyond time and space, and her medical training briefly warred with her hesitation to look after a girl she'd almost hated once. During her time on the Tardis, a dead woman had made Martha feel inadequate, but she never pressed the issue, instead opting to simply listen to the Doctor, knowing that he was grieving. He hadn't meant to make her feel substandard, but back then she couldn't help but resent both him and Rose for it. But now she knew where she could help, and she was ashamed at the way she'd thought about Rose then.

Setting her cup down, she stood and made her way over to the disused bedroom where the Doctor and Jack had deposited Rose. She was unsurprised to find the Doctor already there, snoozing as he leaned forward heavily in a chair at Rose's side. Martha tried to enter the room quietly, but her light footsteps were not lost upon the Time Lord's senses, and he woke and straightened.

"I wasn't asleep!" he said hastily.

"Doctor, nobody's expecting you to spend the whole night watching Rose. Even you need a little sleep, and any of us would be happy to take a turn looking after her," Martha said reasonably. "Besides, if I were Rose, I'd be a bit uncomfortable with you watching me sleep twenty-four/seven. It's a bit too Edward Cullen for my tastes."

The Doctor looked bewildered. "Who?"

Martha fought down a laugh, and then quietly moved to Rose's other side. Her eyes were closed, and her face was less pale, but she showed no sign of stirring. The mechanical implants were still there, and just looking at them still nearly made Martha cringe. She knew that Rose was free from Eve's dominion now, but all the same, the implants reminded her of the Toclafane. Still, Martha swallowed her unease and hesitantly reached forward and pressed her fingers onto Rose's right wrist, to find that she had a healthy pulse of seventy-one. Her breathing seemed normal, as did her temperature, although she'd need a thermometer to tell for sure. Still, just a superficial examination was enough to indicate that Rose was mostly fine physically. "Did she wake up at all during the night?" asked Martha.

The Doctor shook his head. "Too tired, I think."

Martha nodded. "I'll need to get my equipment to look her over properly, make sure she's all right."

"No need," the Doctor told her. He reached out and placed a hand on Rose's left upper arm. He paused for a moment. "Temperature's at 36.9. Bit cold, but nothing alarming. Thirteen breaths per minute, normal. Pulse at seventy-one beats per minute, systolic hundred and one, diastolic sixty-nine." He leaned forward so that his face was very close to her arm. "Blood oxygen at eighty-two mmHg, pH level at 7.36, normal level of bicarbonates. And she needs a bit of nutrition." Throughout all this, Rose didn't so much as twitch. Martha stared at the Doctor, eyebrows raised, and he shrugged. "Superior Time Lord senses. Can't help it."

"Okay, that's not creepy at all," Martha snorted.

The Doctor looked back at Rose, and he looked serious again. "As soon as she's ready, I'm taking her to the infirmary to get rid of those implants. You can help, if you want, Dr. Jones."

"I'm not sure I'd be of much help," Martha muttered, although professional interest made her curious enough. "It's not as though I ever had a crash course in microsurgery."

"Don't worry, I'll handle that part," the Doctor assured her.

Martha nodded. "And afterwards?"

The Doctor looked at her quizzically, and then he realized what she was referring to. He swallowed. "That's entirely up to her."

* * *

><p><em>This image was the only thing I could extract from her mind, some sort of angiosperm.<em>

_Her name? _

_Possibly. Well, I don't what her people call it, but it looks a bit like… _

_Amaranthine. _

Rose's eyes slowly opened, and she blearily stared at the ceiling above her, wanting to fall asleep again. But try as she might, she couldn't really return to the exhausted but blissful oblivion she'd just emerged from. At least, it was a blissful oblivion until she entered into the later stages of REM sleep. That's when the voices came through. Rose had a feeling that her sleep would be uneasy for months or even years to come.

At that thought, all that had occurred the day before came rushing back to her, and she swallowed, feeling as though a heavy weight had settled upon her chest, making it suddenly difficult to breathe. Reluctantly Rose forced herself to sit up, but this did not lessen that discomfort, the overwhelming memories. Trying to distract herself from those memories, all those years of haziness, confusion, and later fear, Rose swallowed again and then looked around the room, blinking at the amount of pink. Didn't seem very Tardis. Then realization hit her.

This was her old room.

She'd forgotten its very existence; but then again, as Rose's eyes fell upon some photographs attached to a mirror in a corner, there were many things she'd forgotten. As if in a trance, she slid out of the bed. An uncomfortable pulling sensation on the side of her face as she brushed against her covers caused her to grimace, and she reached up to feel whatever was causing it, but stopped when she caught sight of her left hand, and remembered. Rose's breath hitched, and she lowered her hand, forcing herself not to look at the metal fingers. Then she slowly stepped in front of the mirror, and stared at herself. It was one thing to know what she looked like. It was another thing to see it. Black tubes and wires burying themselves in her scalp, in her left cheek, under her right ear; a collar-like attachment wired into her neck; a large black processor heavily wired into her left temple.

_Amaranthine_, some distant memory echoed.

Rose's eyes then moved to the photographs, one an old picture of her father, before he died; another of herself with her first Doctor and Jack laughing on the Tardis; another of herself and Mickey Smith, whose existence she had almost forgotten in the eons of captivity; another of herself and the current Doctor laughing during a Christmas dinner in her old flat in London; and finally a picture of herself at eighteen and her mother, a picture she remembered was taken not too long before she met the Doctor. This one she stared at the longest, unsure of how to react, wanting to cry but somehow unable to do more than stare, unable to turn away from what she was seeing: the juxtaposition of a very old woman in the body of a twenty-year-old, covered with cybernetic implants, with evidences of another life she could never return to.

_She's not Rose Tyler. Not anymore. She's not even human._

Oh God.

The feeling of compression increased, so that Rose suddenly was gasping for breath, stepping backwards away from the offending mirror, but her eyes remaining fixed upon the photograph of her mother, now no longer part of Rose's life, by her own choice. The fact that she could now be living in a parallel world, safe and undamaged by the fluctuations of time, was not lost on her. What a bloody, naïve fool she was then! She would have been heart-broken; she would have felt alone; but whatever the parallel world offered had to be better than this hell! She rejected her family, that other life, and for what?

Now infinity stretched before Rose, but a dark, aimless infinity that suddenly weighed down upon her. Ten thousand years. That's how long she was stuck in the Void. _Ten thousand years. _And that was just a blink of an eye compared to how long she could live, but to Rose that very thought was unbearable, when she didn't know what paths lay before her. Nothing grounded her, there was nothing to go back to, and nowhere for her to go. She was adrift. All of time stretched before her and yet she could see no future, no point to it. _I don't age. I regenerate_. All would wither before her, leaving her with nothing to continue for.

Rose stumbled away, and she fell backwards, landing roughly with her back against her bedpost, but she barely took notice of the thud of her weight against the wood, as she tore her gaze away from the mirror and clutched at her temples and her hair with her hands, breathing heavily and irregularly, and unable to move any further.

That was how Martha found her when she stepped back into the room from the loo. Instinctively she rushed forward and squatted down in front of Rose, calling out her name and trying to assess her condition, but when Rose didn't respond or even appear to hear her, Martha stood and hastily left the room, calling out for help. Rose noticed none of this, nor anything else until moments later, when she felt a pair of strong arms pull her into a gentle embrace. Then she became vaguely aware of the Doctor whispering comforts to her, though she was in too overwhelmed a state to really process the things he was saying. Then she felt a pair of fingers press against her temple, and a sudden feeling of calm came upon her, enabling her to breathe properly again. Rose blinked, and stared at the Doctor.

"Better?" he asked. The gentleness in his voice caused her throat to tighten, and she looked away, afraid that if she made continued eye contact with him, she'd fall apart.

"Not really," she replied, but she was able to manage a small smile. The lump in her throat tightened. She then glanced at the mirror again, and a single tear managed to escape and roll down her left cheek. The Doctor followed her gaze and his eyes fell upon her reflection and upon the photos. Realizing what had set this off, his embrace tightened, and he then pulled her to her feet.

"I'm sorry," he told her quietly. "I should have found you another room; you were so tired and I was so relieved… it didn't occur to me…"

"It's okay," Rose mumbled. She pulled away from him, her eyes on the floor; it was safer to look at. But doing so jostled one of the external tubes again, and she winced, something the Doctor noticed right away.

"Do they hurt you?" he asked quietly.

"Only when something moves them or pulls on them," Rose admitted. Then she looked up at him. "You said you could get rid of them?"

"'Course I can," the Doctor said. "We can take care of that now if you want."

Rose nodded, and then she took a seat on the bed, and brushed away the wetness on her cheek with her natural hand. The Doctor also sat down and began rubbing her back in a tender gesture that nearly brought her to tears again, but she swallowed and forced them back. Then, half dreading the answer, she asked him, "Mum… is she all right? She's happy?"

"I… don't know," the Doctor admitted, sounding apologetic. "I haven't seen her since… well…"

"Since you tried to send me away," Rose finished his sentence. The earlier feeling of regret swept over her again, causing her breathing to hitch.

"Yeah." The Doctor hesitated. "She doesn't know what happened to you."

To her surprise, Rose felt slightly relieved. "It's better that way," she sighed. "She doesn't need to know how right she was."

She muttered this last bit to herself, forgetting momentarily about the Doctor's "superior Time Lord senses," and he started and stared at her. "Sorry?" She could hear fear and regret in his voice, and she couldn't stand it.

"So," she said abruptly, changing the subject, "implants?"

"Right." The Doctor took her hand and pulled her back to her feet. He reached out and ran a finger down one of the tubes. "C'mon. Things will seem better once those are gone, I promise."

* * *

><p>Jack's day began with a Weevil sighting, an unsurprising if annoying occurrence, given that the Rift showed signs of increased activity over the past few hours, probably due to the brief reopening of the breach in the Void. When Ianto got the alert about the attack, Jack had been forced to leave the Tardis for the couple of hours or so in which they tracked down the errant creature, though fortunately apprehending it before it could harm anyone.<p>

Throughout the chase, however, Jack was impatient to return to the Tardis, as Donna had earlier informed him of Rose's impending surgery. He felt like things would be better for everyone and especially for Rose once those cybernetic processors were removed from her body. Still, there remained the nagging worry that something would go wrong during the operation; there was still so much they didn't know about Helial technology, after all. But he trusted the Doctor.

When he and Ianto finally shoved the sedated Weevil into a cell and Gwen sealed the door, Jack leaned against the Plexiglas, sweat dripping down his neck as he caught his breath. Then he checked his watch. It had been nearly three hours.

"She'll be all right, Jack," Gwen reassured him.

Jack didn't reply. He trusted the Doctor, and if all went well, Rose would be all right; at least physically, she'd be all right. He'd only seen Martha briefly that morning, but it was a long enough meeting for her to mention that Rose had suffered what sounded like a panic attack when she woke up that morning. To Jack, it really wasn't all that surprising. It wasn't Rose's physical condition that worried him the most. He, after all, understood Rose's onerous situation better than anyone, except perhaps the Doctor.

Once his breathing slowed to its normal pace, and he wiped the sweat from his forehead, Jack looked at Ianto. "Any follow-up from UNIT about yesterday?" The Weevil had prevented him from inquiring that morning.

Ianto nodded. "It's nothing too worrisome; probably will be a pain in the arse for Martha later, though. They're asking lots of nosy questions about Miss Tyler, including whether or not to take her off the list of the dead. I'll leave the report on your desk."

Jack sighed. "I'll tell the Doctor and Rose as soon as I next see them. That's really for her to decide, after all."

"Do we know what's going to happen with her now?" asked Gwen.

Jack shook his head. "It's too soon; she's only been disconnected from Eve for about twelve hours." He glanced at Gwen. "I know you're not too shaken about what happened back on the Void Ship…"

"Not the first time I've been held hostage," Gwen shrugged.

"… but maybe you should tell Rose that you don't hold that against her," Jack told her. "She'd appreciate it."

Gwen smiled. "Sure. I can tell she means a lot to you."

Jack could only return her smile. Then he set off for the Tardis, which was parked near the Hub's entrance. When he walked into the console room, he found an increasingly impatient and worried Donna pacing around by the captain's chair, shooting glances towards the other rooms.

"Are they still not done?" Jack asked.

"No," Donna told him. "I don't like it. What if something went wrong?"

Jack swallowed, but he explained, "Advanced microsurgery is complicated at the best of times; but using it to remove pieces of technology relatively unknown to you is another matter entirely. I'm sure the Doctor can handle it, but it's going to take time. We don't know just how much Eve wove its system through Rose's body."

Donna looked slightly reassured; at least she'd stopped pacing. She then glanced at her watch. "Three hours in surgery. Ain't she the luckiest girl in the universe."

Jack couldn't help but crack an uneasy grin at that. But before he could say more (or get a chance to flirt a bit), Martha stepped into the console room, looking tired but satisfied.

"Well?" Donna demanded.

"Rose is out of surgery," she told them. "It looks successful. The Doctor says she'll be fine, but she'll be weak and in pain for a few days. There were a lot of implants… it took us nearly an hour just to locate them all. And he couldn't save her hand; she's stuck with that prosthetic for the rest of her life."

Jack let out a rattled breath, feeling both saddened at that last bit, and relieved that she'd recover.

"Is she awake, though?" he asked.

Martha nodded, and Jack immediately set off for the infirmary without another word. There he first saw the Doctor in a corner, cleaning his tools, and rambling to Rose about something, who had lay on a bed with her face and neck covered with moleskin-like bandages, and a large piece of gauze was attached to her temple. Her eyes were closed, and Jack couldn't tell if she had fallen asleep or if she was listening to the Doctor. On a tray on the metal table beside her lay dozens of metal pieces, including the external wires and tubes. A piece of paper beneath them was stained with spots of blood.

The Doctor stopped talking upon his entry, and Rose opened her eyes and looked at him with a glassy expression. Jack, however, immediately made his way to Rose's side.

"Hanging in there, Rosie?" he asked, trying to sound chipper.

"A bit," she answered quietly. She closed her eyes again. "Surgery's a bitch."

Jack looked at the Doctor. "Haven't you got her on a pain killer?"

The Doctor looked indignant. "Course I have!"

"I'm fine," Rose protested. "Just tired, and yeah, they sting in places, but I've had worse." She looked at the Doctor. "Could use some food. Some tea as well, I think."

The Doctor, in the process of washing his hands, turned the tap off and began to dry them. "How did Eve keep your body nourished?" he asked Rose.

"Periodic supply of essential nutrients and proteins mixed with an extra burst of adenosine triphosphate," Rose answered quietly. "I never ingested food during that time, though."

Jack and the Doctor glanced at each other in mild surprise at Rose's free use of technical terms, and the Doctor then subtly shook his head and continued talking casually.

"But it sustained your rejuvenation cycle," he said thoughtfully. "You haven't eaten for… well, since before Canary Wharf, but your digestive tissues would have continued to regenerate… what I'm getting at is how much your stomach would be able to handle. Can you eat solid food, for instance?"

"I have no idea," Rose admitted.

The Doctor sighed. "I guess it's a matter of trial and error, then. Be back in twenty minutes." He then looked at Jack. "Look after her while I'm gone."

"No problem." Jack gave him a playful salute, which the Doctor returned with an amused smile before leaving. Jack then pulled up a chair by the bed and reached out and grasped Rose's right hand; her prosthetic left hand remained under the covers. Jack had a feeling that Rose was avoiding looking at it.

Looking at the bandages on her face, Jack asked, "Can't the Doctor use that tissue regenerator to heal those?"

Rose gave an exasperated growl. "He said it's better not to, unless it's a life or death matter; not if you've got a naturally regenerating physiology." She then leaned her head back, looking resigned. "He's right, though. There's not much point in having that ability if you won't let your body use it. Too much artificial healing isn't good for someone like me."

Jack gave her hand a sympathetic squeeze. "It's just for a few days, though."

"Yeah." Rose looked away. "A few days. In ten thousand years, it's not much, is it? Or the rest of it. Knowledge I shouldn't have, a longevity I shouldn't have… doesn't really make me human anymore, does it? I don't fit in anywhere." She closed her eyes for a moment. "I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me."

"Kipling?" asked Jack.

"Yeah." Rose then looked back at Jack with a pained, frightened expression. "Jack, how am I supposed to live like this?"

"As a biological immortal?" he asked unnecessarily. Rose flinched at his words, but he gave her a gentle smile. "Rose, how much do you remember about the Game Station?"

Rose looked somewhat confused by the question at first, but then she swallowed and admitted, "Everything."

"Including the Time Vortex?" asked Jack, surprised. "The Doctor told me that had been closed off from your memory, that a human couldn't handle that knowledge."

"Eve completely repaired my memory, and I'm half-Helial now," Rose reminded him.

"Then you remember bringing me back to life," he inferred. "And what followed."

A guilty look crossed her face. "Jack, I'm so sorry. I swear, I didn't mean to do that to you."

"I'm not accusing you!" Jack reassured her hastily. "Yeah, being immortal's hard. And you wanted me alive, so I can't hold it against you. And it's damn useful sometimes."

Rose looked somewhat sheepish. "Yeah. Sorry about Eve shooting you. I couldn't prevent that."

"The point is, I've been in this current, Rose. I know how it is. You've been trapped in the Void, and you're not sure what to do now that you're free for the first time. But I've had hundreds of years to think about this."

"But how do you handle it?" she asked.

"I found a purpose," Jack told her simply. "You should do the same."

Rose stared at him, before staring off into space with a contemplative expression. Then, after a few minutes of quiet reverie, she looked back at him, and gave a small smile. "Where would I be without you, Jack?"

He raised an eyebrow. "You'd be a pancake in 1941."

Rose managed a small laugh at that, and Jack leaned back, grinning, pleased that he'd managed to cheer her up at least that much.

"Right, here you are!" the Doctor suddenly said as he re-entered the room with a tray in his hands. Rose squinted at it and saw an assortment of different foods. "Let's see what you can handle. Jack, could you move that thing over on the table?" He nodded at the tray with all the removed implants. Jack took up the tray and carefully left it on the counter by the sink. The Doctor put the tray down and stepped back as Rose bent over it, frowning. Just then Donna and Martha came in.

"Did I just see the Doctor carrying a _dinner tray_?" Donna demanded.

Jack grinned. "Bit domestic of you, Doctor."

"Oi!"

Rose, taking an experimental nibble from a small sandwich, looked up with a smile. "Nothing ever changes."

The Doctor grinned at her. Rose then looked at the other two women, Donna walked over. "Hi, we haven't met properly. I'm Donna, this is Martha."

Rose nodded. "Been traveling long with the Doctor? How'd you two meet up with him?" When Donna snorted, she raised an eyebrow.

"She just appeared inside the Tardis," the Doctor huffed, pointing at Donna. "In deep space. Out of nowhere. In a _wedding dress_! _And_ she accused me of kidnapping her!"

Martha stared at Donna. "Wow, and I thought mine was mad."

Rose frowned at Donna. "How'd you manage that, then?"

Donna shot the Doctor a look. "_He_ said I'm a pencil in a mug."

Jack sniggered.

"Long story short, a Racnoss diffused her cells with Huon particles, hoping to use the energized particles as a food source for her hibernating offspring," the Doctor started to explain, but then Rose cut across him.

"Oh right," she said thoughtfully. "Energize the particles and they'll fix on the nearest energized source, which I'm guessing was the Tardis, then make a quantum leap, bringing Donna along for the ride. Spontaneous teleportation. Yes, that would do it." She frowned. "I thought the Racnoss were extinct."

Donna gaped at her, and Rose stopped talking abruptly. "Blimey, you sound just like Skinny Malinky."

* * *

><p>Rose was weak from the surgery for a few days, and so as to ease her recovery, the Doctor kept the Tardis stationed at Cardiff. It was a break from aliens and adventures that everyone needed. Rose spent much of that time asleep, but in her waking hours she spent the time getting to know Martha and Donna, both of whom she took a quick liking to. With the Doctor and Jack sometimes present, the two women regaled her with stories about their travels on the Tardis. For Rose this was a pleasant distraction from both the physical pain from the surgery and the memories of the <em>Eternal<em>, which haunted her the most when she was trying to rest.

On the fifth day, she was well enough to roam around outside the infirmary, and when everyone else had gone to bed, she stepped into her old room (having spent the nights in her bed in the infirmary). There was nearly always someone, usually the Doctor or Jack, present when she woke up in the mornings or from naps, so this was the first time she was alone since her first awakening. She looked around, taking in the pink and the clutter of rejected clothes, the dressing table with forgotten eye shadow palettes and mascara tubes, and the pictures on the mirror; and then looked up at the ceiling, as she had often done during her time on the Tardis, and quietly said, "Change it."

The Tardis merely thrummed in response.

Rose let out a yell of pained anger, and strode over to the dressing table and violently swept the makeup off its surface; they cluttered to the floor loudly. "Change it, damn it!" She shouted. "It's not me! This isn't me anymore!"

Picking up an old pair of trainers, she flung them at a desk, where they smacked into a CD player; both fell from the desk, and the player burst open, the CD inside falling from it. She then strode to the mirror and ripped the photos from it, before throwing it down and smashing it. Stepping over the broken glass, she then yanked open the closet and began throwing out old clothes. _God, I really used to be a chav. _She then turned around, bent on she wasn't even sure what, but her feet twisted in a discarded hoodie and she tripped and fell to the floor, her back roughly colliding against the bedside table, knocking the wind out of her.

Now that she had stopped yelling, the Tardis hummed again mournfully, and she felt something touch her, calming her, a sensation she wasn't unfamiliar with; she'd felt it ever since Satellite Five, some intrinsic connection with the time ship. Rose managed to stop herself from bursting into sobs, but she did look back up, tears streaming down her cheeks, and she whispered, "Change it. Please. I can't stand to look at it."

There was another hum, and Rose closed her eyes, feeling an odd rushing around her. She waited. Then when the sound died, she opened her eyes to find that, as requested, the décor had changed. The pink had become a light blue; the broken glass had vanished, as had the clothes, probably stored in the Tardis wardrobe. The stacks of CDs and the player had vanished as well, and the bed and the dressing table had changed design. A bookshelf stood in a corner, and an armchair next to it. A desk had appeared by the dressing table, and looking at it, she saw a single, leather-bound book lying on it. Rose unsteadily got to her feet, and made her way over to the desk, and picked up the book to find the pages blank. Evidently the Tardis felt she needed a journal; but usually the Tardis could tell what her passengers needed, sometimes before they themselves did. Looking back up, Rose whispered, "Thank you."

The Tardis murmured sadly.

* * *

><p>The next morning, Martha had received a phone call from Colonel Mace informing her that she would soon be needed back at work, and so that morning she had given her farewells and took a train back to London. Jack and Donna remained, although the former, who never seemed to truly have a break, would frequently spend time in the Hub outside monitoring the Rift. Though Gwen and Ianto seemed to get along fairly well with the others, they kept their distance, probably feeling awkwardly like third wheels.<p>

Shortly after Martha's departure, after leaving Ianto to feed the Weevils, and after a quick check on Tosh's old computer to make sure that the Rift was normal, Jack pushed open the Tardis door and stepped in. A quick survey of the console room told him it was empty, so he quickly made for the corridor. He slowly paced up and down the hall for a moment, trying to think where the Doctor would be hiding, but then his thoughts were interrupted when a soft, hollow crack met his ears. Curious, Jack crossed the hallway and entered the library.

The Tardis library was always the neatest room in the ship; a tall room with towering bookshelves, filled with thousands of volumes. In one corner stood three sofas, each facing a television set, and in another, several armchairs situated around a coffee table. At first glance, the library appeared to be empty, but as Jack turned to leave, he caught sight of the Doctor and Rose in another corner by the pool table. They both saluted him as he approached.

"You're looking fabulous today," he told Rose happily. As he spoke, she rubbed the bandages on her temple and cheek, and then picked up a cue from the table.

"Thank you," she finally answered, applying chalk to the cue. "You're lying, and I still look like hell, but thank you. Still, I am feeling much better."

The Doctor grinned. "Found her in here with rolling pool balls around the table, and challenged her to a game."

"And Donna's still in bed," Rose added, "so it's just us three for now."

"Happy threesome? Works for me," Jack remarked, giving her a wolfish grin.

"In your dreams, Harkness," she snorted.

Jack laughed. "You always are."

The Doctor bent down and carefully positioned his cue. He fired, and a red ball bounced off the side of the table and rolled into a pocket. Looking up at Rose, he asked, "So, what were you thinking about when I came in?"

Rose shrugged. "Lots of things. Among other things the Void Ship was a very… educational experience."

The Doctor looked at her thoughtfully. "And by educational you don't just mean what you know about Eve."

Rose shook her head. "No. Taledrevan Void Ships were designed to assimilate as much information as possible whenever they land. Eve connected to the Internet the moment that ship landed."

"Absorbed the Internet, more like." The Doctor scrutinized Rose with an expression of great interest. "I was wondering when _you_ suddenly had extensive knowledge of T.S. Eliot."

"Among other things," Rose muttered absentmindedly. She leaned back, and started staring at nothing, her expression distant.

It was then that the Doctor curiously asked, "Why didn't Eve kill me? It shot Jack on sight, but not me. Why?"

Rose shot him an annoyed look. "Aside from me stopping it?" When the Doctor looked sheepish, her expression softened and she answered, "Eve was obsessed with directive, and the Helials' policy was to take a Time Lord captive, if one was found, for questioning. It was wrestling between two directives; wasn't difficult for me to persuade it what directive to take."

"Oh. Thanks for that."

She shrugged again. Then she bent over, and fired her cue. A ball with green stripes rolled into a corner pocket. Shaking his head with a small smile, the Doctor took his turn. This time the blue ball narrowly missed the pocket.

"So Rose, what are you going to do now?" Jack asked, remembering their conversation after her surgery.

She made no answer, but her expression became a bit fixed, and she breathed in deeply. Her prosthetic hand gripped the side of the pool table, and it became clear that she wasn't going to answer. But the two men watching her didn't need her to, and the Doctor, shifting on his feet awkwardly, picked up the chalk and began rubbing the end of his cue. Rose, meanwhile, bent down and took her turn. A yellow-striped ball rolled into another pocket. The Doctor raised an eyebrow.

"Blimey, you never were this good!" he remarked.

Rose smirked. "I picked up a bit of trigonometry since we last played this."

"What else do you suddenly know?" asked Jack in amusement. Rose, however, didn't return the grin. If anything, she became more stony-faced, and Jack regretted his words; it was too soon to joke about that, of course. But to his surprise, Rose answered his question.

"A lot more than I should," she told him quietly. "When I say I remember everything that happened on the Void Ship, I mean _everything_. Eve knew everything about me the moment I was wired up to it. The transfer went both ways. I know almost everything you can know about the Helials and their science… and their ways."

Rose's voice trailed off, but the Doctor didn't miss the foreboding tone. "What are you saying?" he asked, feeling suddenly alert.

Rose sat down in the chair behind her, and again looked at the pool table, considering how to answer. Then she looked back at the Doctor. "The Helials waited out the Time War inside the Void, but not because they were afraid to fight." She watched as the Doctor positioned himself around the table to take his next shot, but he was clearly listening intently. "On the contrary, they could have assisted the Time Lords, and judging from what I've seen, I think that the combined powers could easily have overthrown and forever destroyed the Dalek race."

The Doctor nodded. "That's why the Time Lords sought their help."

"But as far as the Helials were concerned, it was more in their interest to allow the Daleks and the Time Lords to destroy each other," Rose reminded him. "The British Empire times a million is an apt description. Their actions during the Time War practically _defined_ 'divide and conquer.'"

Jack watched as the Doctor shot the cue ball, but he was no longer paying attention to the game. Neither was Rose. Their eyes met, and Jack's heart seemed to still and he understood what she was saying. He swallowed apprehensively, but the Doctor didn't seem to have caught on yet.

"You know," Rose said thoughtfully, "the only thing that discouraged the Helials from invading our region of space was the presence of the Time Lords. They were ruthless imperialists, but they knew a lost cause when they saw one."

Rose watched him for a moment, and then she stood again and slowly walked around the table, her eyes fixed on the cue ball. When she positioned herself for her next turn, she aimed her cue. Then, instead of firing, she straightened and looked at the Doctor intently.

"Since the Time War is over, and the Time Lords are no longer around to stop them…"

The Doctor put his cue down, and stared off into space, his expression one of sudden realization. "They're coming," he finished her sentence.

Rose nodded. "It's not in their nature to forgo such an opportunity."

Nobody spoke. Even the background hum of the Tardis seemed to have quieted as the long, dark path before them became apparent, and the result of the Time War, the new age, came into perspective.

"Maybe Eve's actions were, in the long run, to our advantage," Jack said pensively.

Rose and the Doctor stared at him, and he hastily clarified, "The Void Ship was just a prelude for when the real thing comes. But this time we can be prepared for it."

The three of them fell completely silent, each to their own thoughts, but each suddenly realizing the truth of Jack's words. It was, after all, the difference between being caught unawares, and anticipating an event; because only then could the universe move on from the Time War.

For Rose, it was as though something had clunked into place, and suddenly she heard Jack's words from the infirmary repeat inside her head: _I found a purpose. You should do the same_.

She'd thought about those words many times since then, and she knew he was right; but finding a reason to continue was easier said than done. All she could do for now was to go through alternatives of what to do with herself immediately. The obvious possibility was to return to her old life, to continue to travel on the Tardis with the Doctor and Donna. Doing so with the intent of studying the Helials and when they would return seemed a practical course of action, but even before that occurred to her, when she first considered staying, she was almost stunned at what little appeal this held for her. In fact, her feelings almost revolted against it.

She couldn't quite explain it, even to herself. Perhaps it was that she couldn't ever go back to just being a follower, not with a million years of knowledge grafted into her head, not after ten thousand years alone. Perhaps she wasn't sure about where she stood with herself, let alone with the Doctor. But whatever the reason, the very thought of trying to return to her old life was intolerable.

The alternative, however, was a frightening one. There was a degree of appeal to it, otherwise she might not consider it at all, but it would be a dangerous step onto a shaky foundation, like wading into a current; after that, there would be no knowing where she was swept to.

Rose let out a rattled breath. _I made my choice a long time ago, and I'm never gonna leave you. _But she'd known so little then. She made a choice, but she no longer knew who "she" was. How was she supposed to hold to the promise of a girl she no longer understood?

Rose bent down and took her turn. Her sudden mastery of trigonometry served her well, and the 8 ball fell into a pocket, ending the game. Then she pressed her lips together in a moment of grim determination.

No. She was no longer the girl who made that promise. A long-missing empire was returning, and she alone truly knew them, understood how they thought. A path suddenly stretched out before her, and though she could not see its end, she knew that her state of existence started with the Helials and was bound to the Helials. She was Amaranthine. Whatever that meant. And she made her own way.

**End Part I**

* * *

><p><strong>AN:  
>Merry Christmas!<strong>

**Well, that was it. Probably a surprising ending for those who haven't read this before, though there was a considerable amount that I added to this chapter. The original version only had the first and last scenes in this chapter. I remember when I first posted this, I got a lot of readers asking about Rose and the Doctor getting together at the end, and I hope that this chapter explained why they don't more adequately than it did in the original. I posted more details on the blog, where I give additional explanations that I didn't put in the text. **

**I haven't quite finished the revision of the next story, but the first few chapters are ready. They probably won't appear for a couple of weeks, however, because I'm going out of town tomorrow, and I'm not sure if I'll have much opportunity to continue until I get back. **

**I'll leave you with a preview to the next story: **

**_Part II: Cypnov  
><em>**Against her will, Rose has been genetically altered by Helial technology. As she slowly recovers from her ordeal and adjusts to her biological changes, she and the Doctor have become more distant than ever. Meanwhile, the Doctor takes her and Donna to the planet Cypnov, in search of an artifact that Rose believes the Helials accidentally left there. Believing them to be Helials, the inhabitants arrest them almost the instant they arrive. Meanwhile, a dangerous political conflict is stirring between Cypnov's nations, and in order to survive, Rose, the Doctor, and Donna must choose which side to trust.

**I've also made a couple of new blog posts: "Amaranthine," an explanation for Rose's name change and its linguistic and symbolic value to this story; and "She's ageless now, right?" which talks about Rose's agelessness and her relationship with the Doctor, going into greater detail about why she doesn't get together with the Doctor immediately. Remember, the link's on my profile page. **

**Until next time,**

**Ancalagar**


	11. Cypnov announcement

**Dear Readers:**

_**Cypnov**_**, the second part of the "Perennials" series, is now about to be posted. I hope you enjoy it as much as you did "Eve of the Eternal." As always, I love to hear from you as well, so if you have any suggestions or constructive feedback, or any questions or comments, I'm very open to hearing it. **

**I'll post the preview again:**

Against her will, Rose has been genetically altered by Helial technology. As she slowly recovers from her ordeal in the Void, and adjusts to her biological changes, she and the Doctor are more distant than ever, unable to return to the same close relationship they had before, however much the Doctor desires it. Meanwhile, the Doctor takes her and Donna to the planet Cypnov, in search of an artifact the Helials accidentally left there. In a world divided by corruption, dementia, and injustice, they get dragged into a deadly political conflict between two warlord nations, and must choose who to trust.

**The plot in this version will have a few points of departure from the original, which I hope will increase the suspense and the danger the Doctor, Rose, and Donna will face. **


End file.
